JUMP CUT
A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY MEDIA
Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media
Issue 17
April 1978
Source: ejumpcut.org
Jump Cut was founded as a print publication by John
Hess, Chuck Kleinhans, and Julia Lesage in
Bloomington, Indiana, and published its first issue
inl974. It was conceived as an alternative publication of
media criticism—emphasizing left, feminist, and
LGBTQ perspectives. It evolved into an online
publication in 2001, bringing all its back issues with it.
This electronic version was created with the approval of
the Jump Cut editors and is licensed under a Creative
Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
License.
Table of Contents
Jump Cut, No. 17, April 1978
Brothers by Kate Ellis
Healthcaring: From Our End Of The Speculum by Marcia Rothenberg
Chicago Maternity Center Story by Judith Gardiner
Kartemquin interview by Kleinhans, Robin Lakes, Lesage, Anna Marie Taylor
American Shoeshine by Robert Pest
California Newsreel by Bill Nichols
Film and Ideology: Special Section Intro, by John Hess
But It's Only a Movie by James Linton
Ideology, Determinism, and Relative Autonomy by Michael Rosenthal
Sound and Color by Edward Buscombe
His Girl Friday by Tom Powers
Politics of Self-Reflexive Cinema by Dana Polan
Cahiers du cinema's Politics by William Guynn
No Tundra Theories, Please by Bill Nichols
Reply to William Guynn by Chuck Kleinhans
Report on Conference Not Attended by B. Ruby Rich, Kleinhans
Politics of Editing, 2 by the Editors
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JUMP CUT
A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY MEDIA
Brothers
The selling of George Jackson
by Kate Ellis
from Jump Cut, no. 17, April 1978, pp. 1, 8-9
copyright Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, 1978, 2005
George Jackson might have been just another victim of institutional
racism had not one of the largest paperback publishers in the country
brought out his letters in 1970, at the height of the anti-war movement.
His own account of the transformation of a gun-happy adolescent into a
committed revolutionary made Jackson a culture hero for many blacks
and much of the white left. BROTHERS, which purports to bring this
hero onto the larger-than-life screen, raises important questions about
the viability of using the vast resources of the bourgeois film industry for
transmitting ideas that are specifically subversive to the class that
controls that industry. Angela Davis, whose relationship to Jackson
constitutes the "romantic interest" in the film, has defended it as "a
mass cultural phenomenon, about how to sensitize people about the
need to get involved with a movement." fil
Presumably Edward and Mildred Lewis, who wrote and produced this
film, share this assessment with her. But given the built-in pressures
created by the enormous production costs of Hollywood films, the
likelihood of cooptation is clearly much greater in the film industry than
in the publishing business. BROTHERS serves as a good illustration of
this point inasmuch as the Lewises, in making their film, have chosen to
sacrifice most of Jackson's politics in order to sell the part they felt to
have the widest appeal, which may in fact be the part with which they
themselves felt able. How this dilution is realized on the screen is the
subject of this review
The Lewises have used the conventions of two different kinds of films in
order to attract two very different audiences. First, there is the
blaxploitation film, one of the legacies of a militant movement for which
Jackson spoke. Insofar as these films portray black men and women
confronting the white power structure and winning, they project positive
images of black people. At the same time, by reducing racism to a simple
black/good-white/bad dichotomy, these positive images work to mask
the nature of racism under capitalism. The Lewises seem also to have
pitched their film at white liberals, whose sense of outrage did much to
fuel the Civil Rights and antiwar movements. But though outrage can
lead to an understanding of the necessity for class struggle, it can also
lead to a politics that seeks social change by making those presently in
power feel guilty. Neither black pride nor moral outrage is inherently
pro-capitalist, but when put together in the way the Lewises have done
it, that is the message that comes across.
To achieve this end, Jackson's life before he went to prison had to be
completely eliminated from the screen. David Thomas, the George
Jackson character, is an adult in the film, whereas in actuality Jackson
was eighteen when he received his one-year-to-life sentence. Thus the
pastoral opening shots, in which an adult David is shooting rabbits with
his younger brother and a friend, serve to dissociate the film's hero from
any taint of juvenile delinquency. In Soledad Brother Jackson mentions
that he spent summers during his grade school years with his
grandparents in rural Illinois, and did enjoy shooting rabbits then. But
he makes it quite clear that these innocent pursuits were a thing of the
past by the time he began serving time in jail. Since the blaxploitation
hero is generally a conscious product of the inner city, this alteration of
biographical fact would seem to be aimed at heightening the outrage of
the liberal audience while letting it keep its comfortable distance from a
law-and-order stand on crime in the streets.
The scenes that follow, depicting the circumstances that lead up to the
hero's incarceration, continue this whitewashing of Jackson's past. In
actuality there was no question about his having robbed a gas station. In
the film David and his friend pull into a gas station and we watch the
friend rob the attendant behind a distant plate glass window, followed
by David's dismayed response to the stolen money. In the next shot the
friend has disappeared and David is in a courtroom with his entire
family, who insist that he has never run afoul of the law. An aging white
hack lawyer persuades all of them that David should cop a plea, that is,
accept a light sentence instead of going to trial, and off he goes to jail.
We never see the friend again.
Given white feelings around the subject of juvenile delinquency, a penal
system that dealt in this way with an adolescent with the kind of record
Jackson had amassed by the time of his final arrest would be too
ambiguous to generate the level of outrage the Lewises must have felt
they needed to make their point. So instead they show us the
incarceration of a man who was an innocent bystander at a robbery, a
man who has reached his late twenties without being touched by the
strong arm of the law. His only "fault," then, would seem to be that he is
black. Such racism is so blatant that it can arouse rage without pointing
beyond itself to the rest of society. To intensify this racism the Lewises
keep the rest of society out of the movie. Thus there is no mention in the
script of those aspects of life outside the prison by which "Blackmen
born in the U.S. and fortunate enough to live past the age of eighteen are
conditioned to accept the inevitability of prison." [2] Liberal
benevolence will not change these conditions, whereas it can (and does
by the end of the movie) end an isolated case of racism that is divorced
from its context and presented to us in this film.
The prison itself and the portrayal of the prisoners in it are examples of
how the Lewises distort reality in order to appeal to a black audience.
Rather than using a California jail, where prisoners would be
overwhelmingly black and chicano, the Lewises chose the North Dakota
State Penitentiary, where there are normally very few black prisoners.
This also explains why the white prisoners all look like refugees from
DELIVERANCE. The blacks, outnumbered by the white prisoners two to
one, are mostly actors, whereas the white majority are mostly actual
prisoners, and they have clearly not been selected for their charm in
front of a camera. Thus when David decides to sit in the front section of
the prison auditorium, and thus do for jails what Rosa Parks did for
busses, the ensuing melee is clearly a matter of a small band of "good
guys" overwhelmed by a bunch of neanderthals.
By setting up this clear dichotomy, the film does engage, for different
reasons, the sympathies of both audiences. But in the process of doing
so, it suggests that white prisoners are antisocial bastards who deserve
the dehumanization, lack of privacy, and inedible food that prison life
entails, and that only the black prisoners are victims of social injustice
and racism. THE LONGEST YARD, a less politically ambitious film
made for a mass audience, gives a much clearer sense of who the real
enemy is as the black and white prisoners overcome their antagonisms
in order to go after the guards, who are in turn being used by a sadistic
warden.
A further source of social ambiguity is removed in BROTHERS by
having no black guards. This falls in with the blaxplotation formula of
ascribing all evil to white people. The one exception to this is an official
high up in the California prison bureaucracy, perhaps the same man
who is absent because he is attending a penology conference in Atlanta
when a black senator shows up with Professor Paula Jones (the Angela
Davis character) to check out the prison. In any case, we later see an
official criticizing the warden McGee for trying to frame David Thomas
and two other black prisoners in connection with the murder of a guard.
We know that McGee is angry at the black prisoners for humiliating him
during the black senator's visit, and that whether or not he set up the
fight in the recreation area (integrated as a result of the senator's visit),
he was the one who shot the black prisoner whose death caused the far
more serious riot in which the guard in question was killed. The fact that
Thomas was posthumously cleared of all charges stemming from that
incident (this information is given at the end of the movie) seems to
suggest that Warden McGee was wrong, and will be "taken care of by
some enlightened liberals higher up on the penalogical totem pole. Thus
the politics that distinguishes BROTHERS from its blaxploitation
predecessors has little to do with "the need to get involved with a
movement" that will bring about fundamental changes in our class-
stratified social order. Rather it is enlightened paternalism, liberal or
revisionist, that will end the ills of the good-hearted black man.
I suspect that the ideology of the filmmakers is in part behind this. At
the same time, the Lewises did have certain facts to deal with. George
Jackson was cleared of the charges against him, and Angela Davis, too,
won her case in court. Moreover BROTHERS does come down very hard
on the abuses of the American prison system. A strong case is made
against the policy of indeterminate sentencing that can put a person
away for one year to life. We see guards brutally pulling prisoners out of
their cells, making them strip, and then throwing them against the wall
to be searched. We see two prisoners besides Thomas needlessly and
sadistically killed. We can pick up, too, the fear of these guards, the
sense that they are paunchier and dumber than the prisoners at whom
they regularly scream and occasionally shoot. We see warden McGee
telling his superior that he, McGee, has again failed the exam that would
allow him to move up to the next rung of the prison bureaucracy. And
we see him taking his frustration out on the guards who are his
hatchetmen, reminding them with pleasure that they are not very bright
(if they were as bright as he, they would be where he is) and threatening
to fire them if they don't bring him the men who are circulating a one-
page underground paper among the inmates.
The trouble is that McGee himself is nobody's hatchetman, just one
sadistic guy who should not have risen as high as he did. The black
prisoners expose him as a rotten father by staging a demonstration
when the important senator comes to look at his prison. Furthermore
the extent to which the racial antagonism in the prison is his creation is
purposely left unclear. But how is this antagonism resolved at the end of
the movie? Not by the discovery of a common enemy, as in THE
LONGEST YARD, but rather by a sudden conversion on the part of the
white prisoners following David Thomas's death, a realization that this
member of the race they despised had indeed died for their sins.
Therefore, in the second to last scene, the black prisoners are marching
into the dining room, usually an occasion for the whites to trip them or
comment on their animality. But this time they fall in alternately with
the black prisoners and thus end the segregation in the dining room,
born again through a messianic sacrifice.
The presentation of David's death prepares the way for this messianic,
"born again" conclusion. The warden sets David up. Davis is taken by
guards to the laundry room where several other prisoners have been
brought. One white prisoner has a gun. That prisoner says he's going to
escape and wants the others to join him. Guards watch all this on
monitors. David realizes what is happening, grabs the gun, and goes out
into the yard to face the warden alone. In classical Western style the two
men face off in the yard. David kills the warden and is in turn killed by
tower guards. In slow motion he spins around several times and falls.
Man against man; self sacrifice for buddies; heroic death — these things
have all been part of revolutionary struggle, but experiencing them
vicariously doesn't explain why we need to join a movement, or what we
need to struggle against. This sequence only perpetuates the idea of the
lone (male) hero making the world safe for the rest of us with his gun.
It is the final shot, however, toward which this whole series of co¬
optations has been working. Over shots of the now dead David is
superimposed an image of Paula Jones lying in her cell, where she has
been since the courtroom shootout, two tears rolling down her cheeks
and the romantic theme we have heard whenever she and David came
together surging in the background. The music, incidentally, is not a
Muzak version of "There's a Place For Us" but something more
amorphously syrupy by Tai Mahal, a musician I usually admire.
Nevertheless the here the relationship between George Jackson and
Angela Davis has been so emptied of political content that scenes from
WEST SIDE STORY look strong by comparison. This representation is
particularly distressing if one goes back to Soledad Brother. For
instance, in one of his letters to Davis, Jackson says this about women:
"In our last communication I made a statement about
women, and their part in revolutionary culture (people's
war). It wasn't a clear statement. I meant to return to it but I
was diverted. I understand exactly what the woman's role
should be. The very same as the man's. Intellectually there is
very little difference between male and female. The
differences we see in bourgeois society are all conditioned
and artificial." £3]
Since many male leaders of the revolutionary black movement went on
record as saying something very different about the role of women in
revolutionary culture, it is doubly unfortunate that the relationship
between these two people should have been made into the lowest
common denominator upon which the film's two audiences are meant to
converge. For not only is the relationship falsified, it is used to obscure
the politics which, in real life, created its center.
Some time after David Thomas meets Paula Jones he starts wearing
gold-rimmed glasses, an indication that he is now an intellectual. But no
such claim is made for her, or at least no substance is given to it. Davis
herself has noted that, while the film mentions her firing, it does not
mention the fact that she was fired for being a communist. We see her at
a rally urging students to support the three Mendocino (Soledad)
Brothers, but she doesn't really say anything that a woman who loved
her man would not say, either there or in her apartment or in the cell
where she and David meet.
All the letters in Soledad Brother are love letters, though not in the way
the movie interprets those words. What makes them revolutionary
letters, for me, is that I can't imagine anyone reading them without
coming to the conclusions that we could all be like this and are not:
loving to parents, brothers, sisters, lovers, co-workers; sharing with
them a struggle against the forces that profit from our isolation from
one another, and therefore have a vested interest in keeping us hoping
for salvation and fulfillment through the miracle of a "great love."
The problem of conveying this sort of content is one that political artists
in every medium come up against. For only to the extent that an
audience is itself engaged in such struggles will the struggles' depiction
on the screen have wide popular appeal. This was Mao's point in his
lectures at the Yenan Forum, and no left theorist has come up, in my
view, with a more accurate formulation of the relationship between
culture and mass consciousness. What is disappointing about
BROTHERS is the extent to which the relationship between Jackson and
Davis was made into the apotheosis of individualist heterosexuality in
order to sell the film.
I am not suggesting, though, that any attempt to use Warner Brothers,
NBC, or any other branch of the bourgeois media, is automatically
doomed to fail. As I have said, I found more progressive politics in THE
LONGEST YARD than in BROTHERS. Much of this is due, I think, to
the heavy dose of liberal guilt that the Lewises were trying to arouse, in
comparison with its almost complete absence in THE LONGEST YARD.
We were asked to believe by the Lewises that David Thomas was the
embodiment of virtue, a truly Christ-like figure. The Burt Reynolds
character, on the other hand, was just a regular old quarterback who
fixed one too many games.
If the Lewises did not entirely succeed in using the vast resources of
Warner Brothers "to sensitize people about the need to get involved with
a movement," I think its shortcomings should be understood in terms of
what it attempted to do: to appeal to two very different audiences, two
groups which might possibly be open to an awareness of the need to be
part of a movement. Yet the real interests of these two projected
audiences are not as close as liberal rhetoric would like us to believe.
Thus one can only unite these two groups by ignoring large segments of
social reality that neither group is willing, at this point, to discuss in the
presence of the other. In particular, it means leaving out the realm of the
street, where blacks and whites are both victims and no one is really a
hero. Commercial success in the film industry these days seems to
involve exploiting white people's fears of street violence in one set of
films, while black people's assaults on the white world are made super¬
cool in another set of films. The next step beyond BROTHERS would be
to recognize the valid aspirations of both these groups, to record the role
of racism in the lives of people who are neither demonic nor super-cool.
Notes:
L Angela Davis, quoted in Seven Days, 1:8 (May 23,1977), p.35.
2^ George Jackson, Soledad Brother, revised edition (New York: Bantam
Books, 1972), p. 9.
3. Soledad Brother, p. 226.
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JUMP CUT
A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY MEDIA
Healthcaring: from our end of the speculum
Good vibes vs. preventive medicine
by Marcia Rothenberg
from Jump Cut, no. 17, April 1978, p. 3
copyright Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, 1978, 2005
I am a woman, a nurse, and a mother, so I've experienced the
inadequacies, inequities, and indecencies of the U.S. health care delivery
system from several angles. And I certainly would not deny that a white
male dominated medical profession maintains its privileged position
partly by trying to keep people ignorant, mystifying them with
incomprehensible language and other professional trappings. But I also
have learned that the roots of this privilege lie in an economic system
where the many produce the wealth and the few appropriate it and use
it, and the criteria for its use is how much more wealth it will produce
for those few. So, when it comes to the question of how money should be
used to improve and restore the health and safety of most of us — men
and women — our priorities are different from those who hold the purse
strings.
This may seem pretty elementary to some people, and certainly those of
us who were in the Movement in the 60s and early 70s, and participated
in the setting up of free clinics to meet the needs of whatever particular
group of oppressed people we were working with, learned a lot about the
limitations of alternative institutions. But the struggle for free clinics
and the "Women and Their Bodies" literature which came out of the
Women's Movement had some positive effect on raising the
consciousness of people (some of whom became health care workers) as
to how they were being short-changed by the system and what they
ought to be getting and demanding.
However, what was fresh and progressive in the 60s and early 70s can
look simplistic and politically backward now. The politics of the film
HEALTHCARING: FROM OUR END OF THE SPECULUM, produced
by New York's Women Make Movies and directed by Denise Bostrom
and Jane Warrenbrand, harks back to that earlier period, but to the
worst aspects of that politics — narrow feminism and the alternative
lifestyle. The main theme of the film is that only women can understand
women and the workings of their reproductive system — thus women
have to get together to learn how to take care of themselves. It is the
politics of "self health" at its narrowest; not preventive medicine, but
good vibes.
The film begins with individual women telling about how they were
messed over by male doctors who didn't understand and didn't care to
understand their female medical problems. Then there are a series of
pictures and drawings from medical histories showing how women once
had their children naturally, with the help of other women like
midwives; then medical science and male doctors came into the picture
and women's suffering in childbirth began. The example used is the
development of the forceps — expressly designed for the convenience of
the doctor and as an instrument of torture for women and their
offspring. In fact, the forceps was invented to deal with the problem of
breach deliveries where survival of the fetus is closely related to getting
it out of the birth canal. The forceps undoubtedly has saved the lives of
many babies. That it has been misused for the doctor's convenience to
speed up deliveries, and to free delivery rooms for the hospital
administration, has to do with the system which places profitability
above human needs. To imply that women were better off without
medical science and technology is a celebration of backwardness and an
insult to the millions of women and children who died and die in
childbirth because of lack of medical care.
Although the film celebrates the "getting together" of women to control
their lives, there are few visible signs of this, very few scenes where
women are actually in the process of participating together in social
change. There is a lot of emphasis put on the "knowledge of your body"
aspect of self-health in the film, but most of it is discussion of teaching
people, rather than shots of actual classes. The most relevant scene, and
the best in the film, is in Chinatown in New York where you see women,
old and young, stopping at a community health exhibit to hear short
lectures on how to brush your teeth properly, with the aid of a clay
model of teeth, and they also see different birth control devices
demonstrated on a model of a pelvis.
Most of the film does not get into the Community. In fact, a lot of it is in
someone's living room. There is a lot of footage in the living room of a
mother and daughter who work as a team teaching self-health classes —
I missed exactly where this was done or to what kinds of women. That
did not seem very important. They smiled a lot at one another, and it
was implicit and explicit that there ought not to be a generation gap
among women — a woman is a woman is a woman. The high point of
this lauding of self health is when the mother produces a speculum and
proceeds to demonstrate the ultimate in liberation — self-insertion of
the speculum while sitting in your living room chatting with your
daughter. Voila — nothing to it. Cool, casual, self-satisfied. What do you
see at the other end of the speculum, which is why you put it in to begin
with? That is never dealt with. The point seems to have been the
insertion itself. There was a bizarre smugness and self-indulgence about
the whole scene — and an isolation from the reality pointed out by the
Chinatown scene, albeit unwittingly.
The final example of self-health is a visit to a women's health clinic in
Connecticut begun and operated by a women's collective. Very little is
seen of the clinic in operation. Again, most of the time we are being told
about the clinic by one of the women founders in a living room during a
meeting of the collective. There is not much about the details of running
such a clinic, the struggles, its strengths and limitations. Mainly we are
left with the feeling that everybody feels good about it, that the women
who are participating in the collective feel good about themselves and
each other, and that the women doctors they hired appeared when they
were needed, and good vibes were felt immediately because they cared.
The final scene in the film is fitting, underscoring the social isolation of
the film. There is a "demonstration — that is, a staging of a
demonstration. A group of women, some middle-aged, a couple of
senior citizens, youngsters, a black, a brown, appropriately placed,
carrying placards about getting together for better health care. The
group is standing in front of a building which says Yale School of
Nursing on it, but there is certainly no indication that the
"demonstration" is in any way related to it. There are no people
watching this demonstration — except us in the audience. All the women
are singing joyously about "Getting Together", but the overall feeling is
the same as the Pepsi Generation ad on TV.
If the reader detects a tone of impatience with the politics of this film,
he/she is correct. We are living in the midst of a health crisis in this
country. Money for public health care facilities is being denied, and the
cost of private medical care is soaring out of the reach of all but the most
privileged and wealthy in this country. Public hospitals and clinics are
being closed and cut back at a time when, because of inflation and rising
unemployment, more and more people need them. What people need to
know are the facts behind this and the possibility of getting together and
fighting to keep, expand and improve the public health institutions they
already have, and demand that more of the wealth that they produce be
used for their well-being. Films that ignore the social and economic
realities of the world in which they are made and that create illusions
about that world are irresponsible and reactionary.
Women Make Movies, 257 West 19th Street, New York, NY, 10011 (212-
929-6477), produced and now distributes HEALTHCARING: FROM
OUR END OF THE SPECULUM.
To top Current issue Archived essays Jump Cut home
JUMP CUT
A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY MEDIA
The Chicago Maternity Center Story
Community vs corporate medicine
by Judith Kegan Gardiner
from Jump Cut, no. 17, April 1978, pp. 3-5
copyright Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, 1978, 2005
"The film made me really root for the Chicago Maternity
Center. I thought those men were crazy to tear it down.
Having babies at home is better because in the hospital there
are too many sick people. You could get sick; the baby could
get sick. In the hospital they don't spend as much time with
you. You're not the main thing. Besides, in the hospital the
walls are all painted green."
In her reaction to THE CHICAGO MATERNITY CENTER STORY,
released by Kartemquin Films in March, my 10-year-old daughter
shared the enthusiasm of the 400-member audience with whom we saw
its Chicago premiere. Like her, many audience members focused on the
film's first part, which shows the birth of one of the last babies to be
delivered at home through the Center. After the one-hour-long
documentary, a panel of the filmmakers and women health activists
answered questions centering on the "how-to's" of home delivery. In the
audience, nurses training to be midwives supported home delivery, and
about 20 women volunteered that they had had home births. The film
shows home birth and informs the viewer of its advantages. However, as
women health activists and natural childbirth advocates pointed out, the
film is not up-to-date concerning today's primarily middle-class home
delivery practices. It is not intended to provide guidance for prospective
parents. Today, the panelists said, home delivery is an expensive option
available to only a few women, not the inexpensive community service
which was once provided by the Chicago Maternity Center.
As the title indicates, THE CHICAGO MATERNITY CENTER STORY is
the case study of an institution — its history, its positive results, its
opponents, and the unsuccessful organizing attempt to keep it alive. The
second half of the film provides the political analysis of why the
Northwestern University School of Medicine closed the CMC. The first
part seemed the more emotionally charged, easier for the audience to
respond to; they clapped when Scharene Miller's baby was delivered. Yet
involving as the first part is, it is intellectually incomplete without the
second part. The film is a socialist-feminist documentary. The first part
should appeal to any woman who feels she should control decisions
about her body and reproductive life. The second half goes beyond the
presentation of home delivery as an alternate service to criticize the
American system of health care for profit. This part makes the film an
effective organizing aid, capable of generating careful strategic analysis
by committed activists and capable of moving a working-class or
middle-class audience toward thinking about the need for collective
action on behalf of women and people's health. The film's analysis is
convincing and persuasive. The film as a whole successfully taps the
feminist enthusiasm generated by the first half and leads it in the second
part to anti-corporate anger.
The Chicago Maternity Center film began in 1972 as a short
documentary to help save the Center, which was fighting to remain
open. But by 1974, before the Kartemquin Collective could finish the
film, the CMC was closed. Moreover, a fire in Kartemquin's studios
burned much of their working print of the film. Instead of discarding the
project, however, the filmmakers broadened their scope to produce the
present film as a statement about women's health needs and the way
dominant medical institutions fail to meet them.
In the first section of the film we hear from several black, white, and
brown women about their support for home delivery. These women
were all clients or prospective clients of the Center. One black woman
contrasted the harsh, impersonal care she received at Cook County
Hospital, the city's large public hospital for the poor, where she gave
birth to her first child, with the warm attention she received from the
CMC for her second delivery. A Latina speaks of the alienation
experienced by the women who can't express their pain or anxiety in a
language that will be understood by the hospital staff; home delivery,
when a woman is surrounded by her family and friends, is far better.
These are the poor women whom established society accuses of stupidity
and apathy toward its children. Instead, we see that the women are
articulate and actively concerned with their own and their children's
welfare in a setting that gives them opportunities for participation and
expression.
Much of the first half of the film focuses on Scharene Miller, a young
black woman in her first pregnancy. She comes to the Center for a
prenatal checkup. Scharene is cheerful and casual. The male intern who
asks her questions seems a little ill at ease before the camera, but his
questions are friendly and thorough. Scharene listens to her baby's
heartbeat through the doctor's stethoscope. We see that the care at the
Center is humane.
Some background about the CMC intervenes between our first view of
Scharene and her delivery: we wait, as Scharene does, for the pregnancy
to advance. For 78 years, the CMC provided over 100,000 Chicago
women with a low-cost home delivery service. Because of a commitment
to its patient population and its special techniques and staff training,
insisting on and providing adequate prenatal care for all of its patients,
the CMC's safety rate exceeded that of most hospitals and was far better
than the Chicago minority maternal mortality rate. We see scenes from a
melodramatic 1939 movie by Pare Lorenz called FIGHT FOR LIFE,
designed as public relations for the Center. It has an all-male, all-white
cast of professionals, even though the Kartemquin narrator tells us that
Beatrice Tucker, M.D. was then co-director of the Center. In the old film
a serious middle-aged physician tells a young man that he can serve
people by working in the Center and learning sterile techniques. The
need for the Center is emphasized by a scene of a woman dying under
anesthesia in a hospital that has not taken proper precautions. (This
section of the film frightened a four-year-old boy with whom I attended
the performance. The movie is not designed for presenting the "facts of
life" to very young children.)
After the clips from the older film, we return to Scharene's delivery. We
see her house, with its pictures of King and the Kennedys, and the bed
from which she is helped onto the dining room table, which becomes a
delivery table. (The panelists later told us that now home deliveries use
the mother's own bed for deliveries.) The film picks up the birth from
the point at which Dr. Tucker arrives, though the narrator tells us that
medical students and attendants have been waiting with Scharene for
some time. Scharene's labor is long and difficult. She groans and cries
while her friends hold her hands and try to comfort her. The attendants
and the family prepare for delivery. Dr. Tucker briefly and efficiently
tells them how to roll up newspapers and prepare a sterile field. All wait,
sipping water, offering Scharene some, during the hours of her labor. At
the time of the film Dr. Tucker was about 75 years old, but she seems
tough and capable, not "motherly." "On your knees, Doctor," she orders
a male resident physician. Later she tells him to "get your fingers out of
there; you've been in there long enough."
We see the delivery itself clearly, both in close-up and from a middle
range, as though we were one of the watching family members or
friends. A young boy is present. One of the women interviewed earlier in
the film said that she wanted home delivery so that her children would
know about life; she didn't want them thinking that babies grew in the
cotton patch.
Scharene's baby is not in the usual position; finally Dr. Tucker takes
over from the resident, though she continues to instruct him throughout
the delivery. She makes an episeotomy, and delivers the baby with
forceps. As soon as the child appeared, the audience cheered and sighed
with relief.
Some viewers criticized the delivery for being too difficult. They thought
that a film in favor of home birth should show the far more normal easy
delivery instead of a rare, long and painful one. Forceps were used in
only 1% of CMC births. Current proponents of birth without violence
wanted to see different techniques used and wanted the film to show a
delivery without instruments. On the other hand, the film shows a safe
home delivery even in that rare case of "complications" so often used to
frighten women away from home and into the hospital. The film avoids
the goody-goody tone of commercial medical education material, and
Dr. Tucker's tough humor contradicts the Marcus Welby stereotype of
the ideal physician. The Chicago audience, for whom Dr. Tucker is
already a legend, cheered when she first appeared; and they clapped
even louder later when a panelist announced that Dr. Tucker, now about
80 years old and no longer able to make home deliveries, was learning
Spanish so she could speak better with her patients in a neighborhood
health clinic.
Having established that the CMC delivered high-quality maternity care
to many of Chicago's poor women, the film fills us in on the statistics of
the Center's operation. We need to know whom the CMC served and at
what cost to understand why it was closed down. At the time the film
was being made, an entire CMC home delivery cost a poor woman only
$50, whereas a hospital delivery might run anywhere from $600 to
$1200. At the time of the Center's closing, its clientele was 50% black,
35% Latina, and 15% white. By the time the film was finished,
Northwestern University Medical College had already withdrawn the
residents and medical students that had rotated through the CMC as
part of their obstetrical training. A physician I interviewed who had
worked in the Center 10 years ago said that the kind of care shown in the
film accurately represented the service as she had known it then, too.
The departure of the Northwestern staff meant that Dr. Tucker was the
only physician still making deliveries when the Center closed.
The second half of the film describes the losing struggle of patients,
staff, and community groups to keep the Center open. First, mostly
through stills, the film prepares us to understand the struggle by a
history of the CMC and its funding. Originally a charity sponsored by the
wives of Chicago's industrial magnates, the Center then became a
peripheral arm of those same magnates' financial interests. Pictures of
CMC board members change from socialite Mrs. Potter Palmer to B.D.
Searle, head of the drug company. The final trustees of the CMC board
are introduced in still pictures with captions showing their corporate
positions. Many of them are also board members of the new multi¬
million dollar Prentiss Women's Hospital, built by Northwestern
Medical College, which was taking over the CMC. The films show us
promotional material for Prentiss Hospital, promising that
Northwestern will continue to operate the unique home delivery service
from its new site. However, as the new hospital is built, the CMC is
closed, and home delivery is not resumed at Prentiss.
The film's narrator tells us that modern corporate medicine is designed
to produce profit, not to answer people's needs. As visual corroboration
of this idea, the film shows many graphics, chiefly ads and cartoons: in
one cartoon a hospital board of directors smoke their cigars through
dollar signs instead of heads. Such cartoons are not likely to change the
minds of staunch defenders of free enterprise, though other evidence is
more convincing: a Norman Rockwell-like sentimental picture of the old
family physician with a worried mother and a small boy illustrates an
earlier, simpler health care delivery system, whereas a fast flash of
brassy ads represents the present. In one ad, nurses ludicrously ride golf
carts because their rounds are too long to walk. Other ads display
distraught, depressed women who "need" tranquilizers. Still others
show people connected with so many medical tubes and machines that
they look like robots. Graphs show rising health care costs and profits.
Health care is now a $ioo-billion-a-year business, an industry larger
than defense, with enormous profits made through selling technological
equipment, expensive new facilities, and drugs. According to the
narrator, profit is not the only question: the new technology is also
designed to keep control in the hands of a limited class.
In contrast to our system, there is one quick still of a Chinese patient
under acupuncture anesthesia. This visual allusion is not adequate to
introduce the possibility of a health care system designed to serve
human needs and keep decision-making in the hands of patients and
providers. The film gives only the CMC as an example of humane health
care and does not indicate that socialist priorities would make
institutions like the CMC part of the fabric of everyday life and care,
instead of the doomed anomalies they are under capitalism.
The background material prepares us for the specific fight that develops
between the clientele represented by WATCH (Women Act to Control
Health Care), an organization of the Center's clients and workers,
medical students, and women health activists, and, on the other side,
Northwestern University, with the CMC board of "trustees" now acting
on behalf of the large medical school complex. The struggle is a
prolonged one. At first Northwestern University, which had been
providing medical personnel for the CMC, begins constricting its
support. Unfortunately, by the time WATCH and the women working
for the Center realize what is happening, it is already too late. They do
not have a wide enough base in the community; not enough women who
are clients of the Center's dwindling services have the time and energy to
carry on the fight. Even worse, by the time they organize, they can only
negotiate with Northwestern on its terms, rather than mount a wider
community fight for other sources of support for the Center. This section
of the film provides excellent source material for strategic analysis by
groups doing institutional organizing.
We see a meeting of WATCH and some clips of women stuffing
envelopes to send out appeals. WATCH members carry posters and hold
demonstrations. They meet to decide tactics. Although the board of
trustee members are identified for us by captions, the members of
WATCH are not. For example, as Barbara Bishop is shown as a WATCH
speaker several times, and in one scene, she is wearing a nametag that
cannot be read by the audience. It takes a while to figure out that she is a
Northwestern University medical student who supports the Center,
while being under pressure from the obstetrics and gynecology
department at her school to switch her support to hospital deliveries.
Perhaps the filmmakers wanted to show WATCH as a collective without
specific leaders, but more identification of its speakers would have made
this section of the movie easier to follow.
The physician I interviewed said that even 10 years ago the
Northwestern obstetrics and gynecology faculty discouraged students
from working at the Center and disparaged its level of care. She said the
male medical school physicians kept trying to frighten students about
what would happen if complications arose. They tried to make the
students feel that home deliveries were unsafe. In fact, backup facilities
for handling complications were excellent, the nursing staff at the CMC
were trained midwives in essence if not in certification, and the safety
record of the CMC was exemplary. The film omits such evidence that the
medical establishment was in favor of hospitals and against home
delivery for reasons independent of the profit issue. Instead, it simplifies
the connections between corporate capitalism and medical ideology.
The scenes showing confrontations between WATCH and the CMC
board of trustees are the highlights of the film's second part. They
provide a parable of powerful liberals faced with feminists' and poor
people's demands. "We feel even worse than you do," a suit-wearing,
middle-aged white administrator tells a casually dressed, emotionally
upset multiracial group. The CMC is a charity, the administrators tell
WATCH, and it is too expensive for the university medical center to
afford. The women reply that the university has been given huge federal
grants for its new hospital, and some of that money can justly go for
home deliveries. There is no demand for home deliveries, say the
trustees, citing the declining patient load at the Center to only 30 a
month. But the women reply that the university has been deliberately
constricting the service, cutting down its physician supply. Moreover, as
several of the women know from personal experience, the medical
school staff either fails to inform women about the CMC services or
actively discourages them from using it, saying they will be safer in the
hospital. The trustees tell the medical students that they are nice,
idealistic young people.
The confrontation ends with the trustees smooth, unruffled, and
winning. The audience knows that their arguments are specious and
their motives suspect. We can applaud the right-on replies of WATCH
speakers that debunk the liberal trustees. But we also must concede that
right answers don't transfer power. The board retains the power to close
down a money-losing service that helps poor women while raising
enormous sums for a prestigious, fashionable new facility that will be
called non-profit but will enrich many.
The film ends with an explicit political statement by the narrator —
women and health care workers must work together to take control of
the institutions that affect our bodies, our children, our lives. We get a
pitiful last glimpse of WATCH activists selling rummage on a street
corner to raise money for the CMC, after we have seen the slick public
relations brochures for the new hospital. Yet the film is instructive and
cautiously optimistic rather than discouraging. Unlike SALT OF THE
EARTH, BLOW FOR BLOW, or UNION MAIDS, it does not end on the
"up" note of a successful popular struggle. On the other hand, it does not
show the patriarchal capitalist power structure as inevitably in
command. Instead, we get one model of a humane, practical maternity
service. We see a struggle in which women work together, learning their
own strengths and those of their opposition. Our interest now is in the
future," says the narrator, "health care for profit for a few or health care
as a human right."
The movie does not paint an overall picture of what good socialized
health care for this country would be like; its glance at China does not
explain the health care systems of today's socialist societies. The slogan
that "health care is a human right" was popularized by health activist
organizations like Medical Committee for Human Rights in the late 60s
and early 70s. Now, in the absence of a national health movement,
organized to lead us toward socialized medicine in a reordered society,
the ending of THE CMC STORY may leave us somewhat at loose ends.
Despite these limitations, the film is effective. It argues forcefully for the
benefits of home delivery. It raises consciousness about health care
priorities under capitalism. And it helps generate the anger and
enthusiasm needed for institutional organizing campaigns.
Kartemquin Education Films, 1901W. Wellington, Chicago, IL, 60657
(773-472-4366), produced and now distributes THE CHICAGO
MATERNITY CENTER STORY.
To top Current issue Archived essays Jump Cut home
JUMP CUT
A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY MEDIA
Kartemquin interviewed —
Filming for the people
by Chuck Kleinhans, Robin Lakes, Julia
Lesage, and Anna Marie Taylor
from Jump Cut, no. 17, April 1978, pp. 5-8
copyright Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, 1978, 2005
From the start, about ten years ago, Chicago's Kartemquin filmmaking
group has been making radical films for working class audiences. (See
Julia Lesage's interview in Cineaste 7:1, Fall 1975 for an overview of the
group's history.) THE CHICAGO MATERNITY CENTER STORY (see
previous review) is their most recent film. To find out more about making
it and how they evaluated the finished film, in April, 1977, we
interviewed four members who worked on it following a screening and
discussion of the hour long documentary in Logan Square, a Polish and
Latino working class neighborhood on Chicago's northwest side.
Suzanne Davenport and Jenny Rohrer conceived, initiated, and
completed the film. Jerry Blumenthal and Gordon Quinn also worked on
it at various stages.
Kleinhans: The film has had a very long genesis. Why? And how did that
affect it?
Rohrer: This film had a reputation around Kartemquin for the last two
years of being a big turkey that would never get finished. It was
originally conceived to be a short film and be completed before the
Maternity Center was closed, and maybe be a part of the effort to keep
the Center open. But Northwestern beat us to that by closing the Center.
All of us who were making the film were pretty unknowledgeable about
the health care field. The more we found out when we did some research
and reading in the course of making the film, the more we realized that
we had a prime example of what the people in the free clinic movement
and in radical health organizations had been talking about. In being able
to film the Maternity Center while it was open, we had one of the few
examples of good care around. Most people were fighting for an
institution to respond to their needs. So the film kept evolving into a
more ambitious one. Our research and trying to decide what we wanted
to say took us quite a long time. The film changed form drastically.
Quinn: There are some other reasons why it took so long too. We had a
fire and one print burned up in the middle of making it. Also people had
to do other things to support themselves. Finally, when we mixed it, we
didn't have the money to finish it.
From the start, it was going to be a film that had an analysis of the
health care system. But particularly once the Center was closed, you
couldn't just make a film about a struggle that failed. You had to put that
in some kind of larger context. The film always intended to do that, but
after the closing it became absolutely necessary. As you actually wrestle
with the problem of telling a story or making a film, parts of the larger
context disappear. We don't know how to give the overview as well as we
know how to tell a very particular story about a particular struggle.
Blumenthal: It was actually the first film we made which had an
extensive narration. The narration had to carry a lot of the weight, and
writing it was a stumbling block.
Quinn: Right, we had a lot of things to say that did not lend themselves
to being said in the verite style that those of us who were most skilled as
filmmakers knew. We were trying to find a way — a stylistic way — to
say some of those things. It's very difficult. But we really came to grips
with that problem. We said, "Okay, these problems are inherent in this
film. Let's not ignore them. Let's try to solve them. Let's work with
narration, work with problems of abstract ideas, and work with the
problem of bringing in a whole historical analysis for which we had very
little visual material to support it." And I don't think we solved all those
problems, but through our involvement in the health movement and
through taking around rough videotape copies of the film to the kind of
people who would be using the finished film, we did see that politically
that information was necessary to tell the story.
Lesage: When I interviewed you before, you mentioned that this was one
of the first times you took the politics of the Center's struggles as well as
the health industry research back to meetings of Kartemquin as a whole.
In your analysis is there material that you had to leave out that you
really wanted to put in, in terms of political points?
Blumenthal: Yes, there was the stuff Suzanne was talking about at
today's screening: the centralization of health care, the few big health
centers near the lake in high income areas, and the movement of small
hospitals and doctors out of the neighborhoods. Well, there was once a
whole section of narration that we really struggled with about those
issues. Suzanne argued that it ought to be in the film because it was very
important information. And all that's left now is that at one point during
the pre-natal examination we say over Scharene being weighed in that
doctors are fleeing the inner city and nothing is being done to replace
the services that they provided. We did not say more because we really
did not have the pictures to support it, and a whole new section would
have to have been integrated into the film, which already has its
problems in integrating different parts.
Quinn: There were whole sections of the film that dealt with FIGHT
FOR LIFE. And there were whole sections that dealt with the internal
contradictions within the Maternity Center — being a charity institution,
being a kind of scientifically elitist institution. But the film's an hour
now, and you just could not find a way to integrate those into a
manageable length film. You face those kind of real problems. More so
than any other film, we struggled with this film to say more, to put it in a
larger context, to try to deal both historically and economically, and to
really trace out threads of the concrete struggle that we started with.
That's where we always start. We start with something happening. Some
people are struggling around the issue, or someone comes to us, or
something's happening. From the beginning we try to put it in a larger
context. But it's hard. The forms don't exist to do that kind of thing
dramatically and effectively. And I think we're particularly unskilled at
what forms do exist. In some ways you can't really say the kind of things
we're trying to say in a network television format. But when it comes to
writing narration and manipulating words, television documentarists
are able to do a lot of things that we can't do, just because they have
more skills. So we have to develop our skills and we have to find new
forms.
Lakes: The footage of the actual birth and the footage of the Maternity
Center — that part of the film was very positive and powerful: the part
about what could be. But the part about what's wrong with American
health care, where you used ads and still photos, was weaker. The whole
concept of why a hospital is alienating and why women might not want
to go there isn't a real simple idea. There's still a mystification of
hospitals. Couldn't you have done footage in a hospital?
Rohrer: We thought of doing that, but we also thought that people,
through their own experience, are familiar with hospitals, and because
of that we wouldn't have to put that in the film. I don't know if we could
have gotten access to any place to shoot that kind of material. A whole
other area that the film doesn't even approach is what's been happening
in the past three or four years about obstetrics and gynecological care in
hospitals. Prentiss Hospital — which we talk about in the film — offers
all these sorts of things that they say women want. If you criticize them
they say, "But we have all those things that hospitals never had before."
They allow husbands and friends in the delivery room and they allow
rooming-in service and 24-hour service. All these special little deals that
hospitals resisted until just the last few years are now just a whole other
type of sales pitch, that hospital delivery can give to a woman at a
certain price. And that's another set of contradictions, you know: that's
how they responded to the women's health movement. And that's a very
complicated thing because someone — although it hasn't really
happened — could argue after seeing the film that hospital deliveries
have changed, and that invalidates the political analysis in the film.
Quinn: In the second part, I don't think the answer is to do what
Weisman did in HOSPITAL. In fact, the one of the same name with
George C. Scott (dir. Arthur Hiller, 1972) is much better for showing
what's wrong. But I don't think that was our task in this film. We have
found, from showing the film, that people really understand how bad
hospitals are, they have had those experiences and the criticisms start
coming up out of the audience. Sometimes people will say, "Why didn't
you show that?" They're the very ones who will give us ten examples
from their own experience about bad health care institutions.
Also, you can only make so many points in any presentation. And if you
raise one thing, politically you then often have a responsibility to raise
other things. For example, there are a lot of people who want to just
trash Cook County Hospital, and say it's an awful place and terrible, and
blah, blah, blah. But right now the fight is to keep County open. It serves
the needs of a lot of inner-city people. And the people who get the care
there know it could be improved, but it's important to them and they
know that if the institution is closed, they're gonna be worse off than
they were without it. So we just didn't want to get into that whole
question, because it's not that hospitals are all bad; it's more that they
aren't serving the needs of the people.
Taylor: Have you shown the film yet to black audiences, and has there
been any particular response on their part? Have the black women who
were involved in the film seen it, and what have their reactions been?
Davenport: Those who saw it were very interested in it.
Quinn: I showed the film to a black class. The only ones who stayed were
women. And the response was a very personal response: "I know so-
and-so," and that kind of thing.
Rohrer: At the Medical Center showing, it was very clearly divided along
class lines. The black people who were there were not doctors but
hospital workers. And they were very, very positive about the film and
made real class statements. In other words, they were very precise in the
way they answered the women who were into the aesthetic home birth
type of thing. Their answers were: "This is about medical care for poor
people. This is about community control. What you're talking about is a
kind of home delivery for rich people." And their statements were like,
"This film is a film that I would use ..." That came out over and over
again.
Quinn: Also at that screening were some Muslims [followers of the late
Elijah Mohammed] who are starting a health clinic, a whole health
program, and they want to use it in the program. The Medical Center
show was a nice experience because we often are put in the position of
having to defend the delivery, especially the fact that this is not a very
touchy-feely situation.
Kleinhans: Can you say a little bit more about the criticisms you've had.
Rohrer: Well, I just spoke Friday on the phone to some of the writers of
the feminist health book Our Bodies, Our Selves in Boston. They just
finished writing a review of our film for a women's health journal. They
really had sort of the classic reaction of that area of the women's health
movement, which is "I liked the film a lot. I liked its analysis of medicine
in general and hospital care, and how the fight is with hospitals and with
those institutions." But they were totally shocked by the birth in a lot of
ways. I think a lot of it was the fact that Scharene's birth was a
particularly difficult birth. We say it in the narration, it fits within this
one percentile of times when the Center uses forceps and episiotomies
and stuff. But still they really react to that quite strongly and feel that
the film really falls down in that, that the Center doesn’t present a home
birth that has a lot of qualities that they want seen in home births. And
our response is, "Well, it's not that film." In THE MATERNITY CENTER
you're seeing a difficult birth that in many ways wouldn't meet those
expectations, which are legitimate expectations. It's a Center that wasn't
perfect, you know. But we're talking about something else here in this
film.
Another reaction was seen at a national conference in Tallahassee last
month. This group (also called WATCH, like the women in the film, but
it's Women Act to Combat Harassment) is in the National Alliance of
Feminist Women's Health Centers, which formed after a lot of women
received different kinds of harassment and arrests. They showed it the
first night of their national conference. After the film and after the
discussion, which focused on how they have to turn from providing
alternatives into focusing on the quality of care in existing institutions
and hospitals, the whole conference went to the one area hospital,
Tallahassee Memorial, entered the hospital and did an on-the-spot
inspection on the maternity floor. They brought with them a TV crew
and found a number of things. It was to o'clock at night. All the women
were asleep — all the mothers — because they were all sedated. Many of
the babies were awake in the nursery crying. They found Phisohex in the
nursery, which has been found to cause brain damage in newborn
infants. Fetal monitors of the type they put into the uterus and screw
into the baby's head were routine, in addition to IV's and everything
else. And that was the one hospital in the whole Tallahassee, Florida
area. And the next day four women — among them a woman who was
noted for having started the women's self-help movement and several
other women from around the country — were arrested for trespassing.
They don't have as strong a reaction as the women from Our Bodies,
Ourselves did to the birth.
Quinn: The discussion at the Medical Center about that was really good.
There was even someone there who was complaining how it wasn't a Le
Boyer birth, where the lights are dim and the baby comes into this little
water bath and everything. We have had a lot of criticisms of how the
woman is shaved, how she doesn't get the baby right after the delivery.
There are lots of criticisms that do keep coming up in almost any
audience about the delivery itself.
Lesage: There was one woman at the Medical Center who was
marvelous. She said, "I agree with you that I would like to have a home
birth like Dr. Eisenstein gives for $800." But, she says, "I would never
use Dr. Eisenstein's movie, which shows this woman in a great oak bed
with all the friends, delivering, in any of my classes." She said, "I would
only use this movie in my classes, because this movie talks about what
people really need." And she said that one of the things people want is to
know that they're getting all the standards of bourgeois medicine if
they're poor. So, for instance, to create a sterile environment might not
be necessary, but the fact that the Maternity Center went to the trouble
to create a sterile environment meant a lot to poor people, who knew
that in a regular hospital, if you were rich, you got a sterile environment.
If you can convince people that they don't need those standards it's one
thing, but to just say you're not worthy of having those standards is
another thing.
Lakes: Did you ever think of reshooting the birth scene after you shot
this (laughter)? I mean shooting another birth?
Rohrer: If we had had our brains on, and known enough about birth,
actually, maybe we wouldn't have chosen a woman with a first baby.
Davenport: As far as we knew, Sharene was not going to have a real
difficult birth. She wasn't a high-risk patient. She was a candidate for a
normal delivery. It's the kind of a risk you take. We could have shot two
or three and chosen the best one, but that was beyond our economic
resources.
Taylor: Well, I'm surprised about the controversy over the difficult
delivery, because I thought it was wonderful to see how, in very difficult
cases, they could handle it.
We also felt good that the baby looked terrific. And it ended very well, so
we held it.
I've seen another film about natural childbirth, a very middle class film.
In that film the delivery is very difficult too. I think it's good for these
questions to come up, because I think that one of the disservices that
one part of the home birth movement does is it really misleads people. It
misleads women. It's gonna be this wonderful thing ... there's nothing to
it, blah, blah, blah. And that happens sometimes. But it doesn't happen a
lot of times. And it's real hard then. But I got a lot of response from
women who were so glad to have seen that film, to have known that they
hadn't failed in some kind of natural birth process. That it happens to
other people too. It's important to be honest about those things.
Kleinhans: How did you yourselves change in the process of working
with the film, from the time you conceived of it. I mean politically. What
did you first see the film as politically, and are you happy with what you
ended up with?
Davenport: When Jenny and I started out five years ago in 1972, we and
the film were coming out of the women's movement: We were very into
the problems of WATCH and trying to understand them. The WATCH
group had a lot of tensions, divisions, and problems within it. As
filmmakers we were involved in the WATCH group in some way. The
biggest change that we went through was broadening our understanding
of what the struggle related to and just how basic is was. This is one
reason it took us so long to do the film. It took us a couple of years of
research, reading, talking to people, and developing our understanding
of how health services developed and turned into a high profit,
technologically oriented, highly centralized industry. We came to a more
Marxist understanding of it, and then it wasn't just a film coming out of
the women's health movement.
Taylor: Looking back on the process, is it possible to set out what was
actually collective, and what were the important individual
contributions? For example, the writing of the narration ... how was that
put together?
Blumenthal: I think that everybody wrote the narration. I participated in
the early stages of the film and the shooting of the film. And then I
dropped out of it for a couple of years. And by the time I finished up my
other projects, I said, My God, it's not done yet." (laughter: We needed a
midwife.") I came back on it at a point when there was a two-hour
version of the film. It was very clear to everyone that a lot of narration
already written had to come out. The central issue was the one that we
mentioned before. It was, "Well, there's stuff that's real important to be
said to people in general, politically, but how do you say it? Do we have
the material in the film to support it." Quite frequently our discussions
or disagreements would run along that line. There would be one or the
other of us, pushing to get something in, and one or the other, pushing
to take it out because it was a film question. It was not a political
question necessarily. Or the political part of it had to be, for the
moment, looked at from the point of view of what was coherent.
Taylor: What about the shooting? The actual camera work? Was
everybody involved in that as well? Or were there people who were
mainly handling the camera ones who had experience?
Blumenthal: Both experienced and inexperienced ...
Taylor: And what was that based on? Was it based on who wanted to do
some filming?
Blumenthal: We were trying to do something in the making of that film
which we were trying to do as a group, throughout the period that the
film was in gestation at Kartemquin. There were a whole group of
people, some of whom had some skills and didn't have others, and
others who had some skills and didn't have the ones that the others may
have had. And we tried to share them. Some of the camera work was
done by Sue, some was done by Jenny. It was at the very beginning of
their film careers, before they had even really had any experience.
Quinn: I photographed the scenes at the birth ... it would have been
impossible for Suzanne and Jenny to photograph at their level of skill.
But the confrontations with board members and other things were
photographed by them.
We tried to push people. I mean this film was made by people trying to
become a filmmaking group. It was made up of some people who had
organizing backgrounds, some had Newsreel backgrounds, some people
who had a real film background. There were tremendous differences in
skills. And we put a tremendous amount of energy into skill sharing and
developing collective styles of work in this group, and in this film in
particular. More so in this film I think than in almost any other film that
we worked on. It had real problems. I'd certainly never do it again in the
way that we did it. I'd never try to put as much energy into skill sharing
and doing things as collectively as we did. I think it had a lot of value to
it and we learned a lot. But because it was the first time, I think we sort
of went too far in that direction.
Taylor: Is that one of the reasons the film took so long?
Davenport, Quinn, Rohrer, Blumenthal: Oh sure. Definitely. No
question about it.
Quinn: Part of it was just coming to grips with the immense differences
in skills. And in the beginning thinking, "Well, this could happen
through sort of a kind of collective process." I know for a long time the
three of us who worked together tried to find a way to do things
together. Probably it wasn't possible, and it was probably a mistake to
put so much energy into that. Some energy it deserved, but not as much
as we put into it.
Taylor Does everyone feel that way about the skill sharing aspect, that
you wouldn't do it again that way, that it took too much energy?
Rohrer: Not to the extent that we did it. When we started out Sue and I
were interchangeably doing sound and camera, and it was Sue who
pushed me to settle down on that instead of just interchanging so much.
It took a lot of time. Sue and I were very active in other organizations
and dividing up our time a lot. That's not the way that most political
filmmakers approach projects.
Quinn: I've been very struck by the difference between New York and
Chicago in terms of how political filmmakers work. There is very little,
or was very little respect for anything that wasn't direct organizing in
Chicago. And that greatly influenced our group and greatly influenced
how we went about things. In New York there are several political
filmmakers who really don't have very much connection to organizing —
other than through the films that they make — which are usually in an
organizing situation. But that's their connection.
Taylor: Are you thinking of something like HARLAN COUNTY?
Quinn: I'm thinking of HARLAN COUNTY, right. Barbara Kopple comes
from a film background; she worked with film people. That's one of the
finest films I've ever seen. I think it's politically excellent; I think the
whole process of making, it was terrific. But a lot of people in Chicago
would have been very critical of her relation to the events. She was a
filmmaker on the scene, not an organizer, not a political worker.
Blumenthal: Barbara Kopple's politics are in that film. They're in the
four years that she devoted to that project. They're in her thirteen
months living in Harlan County, and her determination to gather all the
materials that she needed to finish the story and not end it prematurely.
It's that kind of commitment that you need to make that kind of film.
Whereas the kind of thing that we were doing — the collective process of
working together and sharing skills — seems to me to be much more
related to one's life than to one's work in a way. It's less appropriate in a
situation where you have a product as the end of your activity — a film
for example. Where you're really striving for excellence and
completeness the two are in conflict with one another. Admittedly
there's some kind of dialectic that has to go on. It can't be a totally elitist
organization, but there's a real conflict of interests. If one is interested in
going through the collective process on the one hand and educating
people in the process of making this object, and yet on the other hand
you're striving for excellence.
Lakes: Could you define excellence?
Blumenthal: Well, you define it for yourself. I don't know what other
word to use.
Davenport: On the other hand there are other groups or individuals who
make political films who are closely tied to political organizations. And
they have a political consensus that's kind of up front and that people
identify with or their organization has a particular view or line, and so
they make films. As you know, a lot of people in Kartemquin — at least
Jenny and Peter — came out of the particular experience of Newsreel in
the 60s, although at different times. But the history of Newsreel was
fresh in a lot of people's minds, whether they were in it, or close to it, or
observers of it, in the sense of seeing the dilemma of projects vs. quality.
That needn't be the dilemma, but in many ways people felt it was. A lot
of the Newsreel films are still useful, but there was a real problem
around that question of quality and so on. That question was where
Kartemquin was politically and how much unity we had. In the history
of Kartemquin, it was seen in the effort to be collective around skill
sharing, the effort to be collective around questions of money and
property, the effort to be collective around the political view of the film,
as well as collective around the actual process of editing and shooting
the film. In this period we were trying to deal with moving out of
capitalist forms and trying to deal in some sense with what more
collective, more socialist, forms would look like. It's a lot to undertake.
We hit a lot of snags and sandbars. There was a lot of struggle and
certainly one aspect of that was that the political tendencies that people
were coming from were different in many respects. People changed
politically in the course of the five years that we worked on the film. And
so there were real differences as the film moved along.
For instance, Gordon and I had a lot of discussions as we worked on the
part of the narration talking about industrialization. I would make an
argument for saying more about the Northwestern Medical Center and
the building of it as an example of centralization, and the process that
was going on in Chicago of the centralization of health services, and of
pulling hospitals out of the neighborhoods, and pulling doctors out of
the neighborhoods and saying more bluntly in the film that those trends
affected black and Latin people more than white working class people.
For whatever reason, Gordon disagreed but would not say that it was a
political disagreement between us. And whether that was because he felt
that I didn't express it clearly or whether he just didn't see it as a
political issue, I don't know. There are people who look at the Chicago
Maternity Center film and feel that it should be more direct around the
issues of racism. We had a long discussion about to what extent the film
could have as its premise that there's a two-class health care system and
that some people are exploited more than others. The tendency in the
development of the film was to focus more on the quality of patient care,
and how industrialization had affected that. I think those are political
disagreements. Gordon might still not think they are, but I think they
are.
I don't think it's a political disagreement but just a matter of organizing
the material we had. I didn't do the research. I didn't write the initial
drafts of the narration. I didn't go and find the materials out of which we
finally fashioned the film.
You did all those initial things. You wrote the original drafts to the
narration: you found all the materials — the pictures and stuff. That was
all your work. There came a point in the film where I had to say "I can't
put something voice-over for which there is no picture. We can't say this
thing; you haven't straightened out these ideas here."
Davenport: But it goes back further, Gordon. We went out and
developed the whole section about profit and how the ruling class makes
money out of health and the health industry. There was really a lot of
research, of picture taking, of additional shooting on the whole section
about industrialization. Well, there were other points earlier when we
felt, "Gee, we ought to go out and do some work, do other incidental
shooting to show the difference between the two neighborhoods, more
about the neighborhoods of Maxwell Street vs. the Gold Coast. And we
should go out and show some more about the other medical center."
And there was that time at which the narration included stuff about how
Chicago had the headquarters of the American Medical Association and
the American Hospital Association.
Quinn: There was a point where Jerry and I were both saying, and I
think it's true, "We don't want to hear any more about going out and
shooting any more stuff. Get it out of a magazine, get whatever is
available, let's get this thing done." Had you done your work better in
the beginning, had the material been there, it would have been OK. We
did not have a political disagreement about those things.
Blumenthal: You're having the same discussion that you had a million
times before. It's not a political disagreement. It's a disagreement about
this particular film and what's to be done with this particular film. It
would have been more of a political disagreement if there were options.
Lakes: And it wasn't an option because of money?
Blumenthal: It wasn't an option partly because of money, but money
wasn't really the main thing. It was a question of energy — the film had
been worked on for four years. And in order to make a movie about the
two-class health system, which Suzanne is talking about, a tremendous
amount of additional shooting would have had to be done. Basically,
given the material that existed on film for us at that point, really a whole
new film would be called for. That was not the film that they started out
to make.
Quinn: And research, too. Wed done a lot of that research, but we had
not come up with a way of presenting it.
Kleinhans: How do you feel about the film now? Are you satisfied with
the politics of the film? How do you feel about criticisms from people
who think it should be a filmically better film and people on the other
side who think it should be even more explicit in its politics?
Rohrer: We made a decision, although we were new to the process of
writing a narration, to write it from the point of view of someone who
was involved in the struggle. Our first narration was a little clumsy. But
after writing it, when the film was nearly finished, we went through the
whole process of putting it on V2" videotape and showing it to lots and
lots of people. We set up a number of screenings to what we considered
our prime audience, our trial audience. We did three screenings in
nursing schools and for some other health groups. We omitted one
group of people who could have given us film criticism at that time, and
that was media oriented people or filmmakers. We're now getting
criticism from that perspective. And we agree with the essence of the
criticism on the large part — that it's over-narrated, that its too
emotional, that it should be more like an impersonal reporter type thing.
Some people say we should have more interviews with administrators of
hospitals giving their viewpoints, like CBS.
Quinn: Jim Klein and Julia Reichert had two criticisms. One had to do
with style, most of which we agree with; and the other does have to do
with some of the politics of the film. We say some things that we cannot
support because we don't have the graphics. For all the reasons we
talked about before, the film has its inadequacies. And we say a lot of
things that we can't really support visually. It's just there because we
said it. And we have a few images that sort of help to carry it off, but not
much. Jim and Julia say that kind of stuff weakens it. Our feeling is that
although we couldn't solve the problem aesthetically, it's more
important to try and say those things than to leave them out.
Blumenthal: The working class neighborhood audiences that we've
shown the film to do not make those criticisms of the film. They're really
happy with it. It comes right out of their experience, and they've got
their whole life to verify and support the things that we say. People who
are sophisticated about media point out those filmic flaws but the
working class people who see it are not so critical of technique. The tone
of narration now is one of someone in the struggle to save the Maternity
Center. In fact, the tone of the film may well be one of the things that
makes it so appealing to neighborhood audiences. And if it is — and I
really think that it is — well, then too bad if we can't get the libraries and
high schools to rent and buy it. It's not a film for them. It's not UNION
MAIDS.
Kleinhans: It seems like there's a trade-off. If you dilute your politics,
you can get to a much broader audience, but you get to them with a very
soft message. On the other hand, obviously you don't want to make a
film that's so dogmatic and so rhetorical that it turns everybody off and
you don't have an audience at the end of the film.
Quinn We all look at it and say, 'It could be a more skillful narration ...
we'll do it next time." The big thing that we've found so far in our
showings is that nobody comes up and says, "Oh, that narrator!"
Lesage: That so-called objectivity is the sneakiest, most disastrous thing
of all in narration, like the voice of God saying, "This is very objective,
and I don't have any point of view of my own, and this is just the truth."
Your narration already has part of that problem by being voice-off. But I
think it's offset by the fact that it's really obviously participating in the
struggle. You don't get the feeling that the narrator is necessarily taking
a "everybody in the United States thinks exactly as I do" point of view,
which is what so many narrators imply: "Now we see jolly Scotland," or
something like that.
Quinn: It's very clear in our film that our narration has emotion and
prejudice. You know right where the narrator is at, and you can take it or
leave it or make your own judgments.
Lakes: This film gets people to say, "What's happening now? What can
we do now?" I'd contrast that with a showing of UNION MAIDS at the
American Library Association. Afterwards people just sat around and
said, "Um, where are those good old days?" It didn't make them think
anything about their own lives.
Quinn: Where you see the film is very important.
Taylor What about the funding you got from the Illinois Arts Council,
where does that fit in? How is it in their interest to give you a grant?
What's your interest?
Rohrer: We got a grant of $10,000 to get prints and show the film in the
Chicago area after we finished it. On the whole Kartemquin hasn't relied
on grants for our capital; we used income from commercial businesses
for our film costs.
Davenport: That's another dilemma that every group faces. To what
extent do you want to be dependent on foundations? How much co¬
optation follows from that? What do they want you to do? Most of us in
Kartemquin were pretty clear that we never saw foundations as a major
source for anything. We knew they were very topical in their interests.
We knew their interests changed from year to year. We knew they were
basically corporate liberals who had various financial pressures that
said, "You gotta get rid of your money." It was ruling class charity in a
lot of ways. It hooked in with government policy. When Nixon came in,
the country swung right, and foundations were funding law
enforcement, only in a more liberal guise. When the Bicentennial came
around, there was a lot of money for art and media. You know, that's
another aspect of corporate liberalism. There are certain times and
places and ways in which money is available in a more democratic way,
and a lot of groups around here got money during the Bicentennial —
the Women's History Project, the Women's Union, and so forth.
Quinn: There's a lot of space in there. We got a little note from one of
the radio stations that said we should write a thank-you note to the
American Hospital Supply Corporation because they paid for a public
service spot announcing that our film was going to be shown, (laughter)
They have guidelines that say they'll serve the community, and then they
end up coming to people like us to in some way bring something to the
community.
Rohrer: Our grant covers a series of screenings of the film in
communities, along with discussions on health care afterwards. The
Humanities Council was very interested in the discussions afterwards.
As for how we actually spent the money: each of the neighborhood
screenings took a good amount of money, and then two of us have been
salaried rather meagerly to coordinate it. Also we spent money on
posters and other PR material and on a translation of the film into
Spanish.
Quinn: When working with liberals like Humanities Council people
we've been criticized by some of them for not making a film that's more
"objective," that's more like network journalism, which pretends to be
objective but never is.
Kleinhans: That seems related to how people often treat political
differences. They avoid openly discussing real political questions in a
film by saying they don't like the form. That's a socially acceptable way
of saying, "I don't agree with you." They mean they don't like the
politics.
Quinn: Form and content cannot be separated; they are dialectically
related. I saw both PUMPING IRON and HARLAN COUNTY with some
filmmaker friends of mine. They thought PUMPING IRON was better
because the cinematography is better. I said, "What do you mean
better?" I don't care about some guy working out with weights, but I care
about miners fighting bosses. Whether the camera shakes or not doesn't
matter as much as the fact that the filmmakers were there in Harlan
County. That has to be seen as part of form.
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JUMP CUT
A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY MEDIA
American Shoe shine
Rag poppin' for those tips
by Robert L. Pest
from Jump Cut, no. 17, April 1978, pp. 9-10
copyright Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, 1978, 2005
AMERICAN SHOESHINE, produced and directed by Sparky Greene, is
a film of conflicting tendencies. For most of its thirty minutes, this short
documentary undertakes an examination of the socioeconomic forces
underlying both the origins and the continued existence of the
shoeshine occupation. Using an expertly edited montage of first-hand
accounts, stills, and "found" footage, some of which dates to the first
decade of this century, filmmaker Sparky Greene follows the shoeshine
business from the earliest days to the present, focusing on the gradual
development of shoeshining as an occupation reserved almost
exclusively for blacks. The shoeshine men themselves provide both
history and analysis, often articulating highly developed views on the
nature of both class and racial relations in American society.
But during the last third of the film, AMERICAN SHOESHINE moves
away from this economic focus to become a showcase for individual
exhibitions of "rag poppin," the musical effects achieved by "popping" a
shoeshine rag. While this activity is not a problem in itself, the upbeat
presentation of the history of rag popping as a way to get better tips,
along with the uncritical inclusion of several "Step'n'Fetch It" type
numbers to the accompaniment of rag popping, suggests a failure to
consider the social implications of such self-debasing performances.
That Greene was aware of this problem cannot be denied. One of the
skilled practitioners of rag popping who appears in this film confesses
that many people accuse him of being an Uncle Tom. Yet Greene seems
to share with this man the view that, as an "art," rag popping is exempt
from such considerations and that, like any art, it confers a special
dignity on its masters. Had Greene chosen to confront, or at least
acknowledge, the contradictions of this position, AMERICAN
SHOESHINE would have been a different, and perhaps better, film. But
as it is, AMERICAN SHOESHINE is still a direct and effective portrait of
the history and practice of a unique occupation, the very existence of
which reveals a great deal about the economic and social structure of
American society.
The film's soundtrack consists almost exclusively of short, apparently
casual comments made by the shoeshine men, sometimes on camera but
more often in conjunction with related film footage and stills. Although
the men who appear in the film represent something like a cross-section
of the adults involved in shoeshining, the majority of those who speak at
any length are older, thoughtful, and articulate. These men relate more
than the history of shoeshining; they also share the wisdom born from
years of trying to survive in a racist economy. Much of the power of
AMERICAN SHOESHINE comes from the honest conviction and
natural poise with which these men relate the details of their lives.
Perhaps their friendly openness stems from the fact that they were
filmed at their shops and stands, usually while working. For as the film
develops, we discover that the workplace is often the only place where
these men feel at home. One also suspects that many of them
participated in the film out of a desire to better understand their curious
position in society and particularly to come to terms with their own
reasons for remaining in a job which both blacks and whites consider
demeaning. Because this process of self-examination is so obviously at
work in the film, and because Greene handles it in a compassionate and
sympathetic way, the process of self-revelation never embarrasses either
the shoeshine men or the audience.
But equally impressive in its honesty is the way that Greene structures
these bits and pieces of experience and observation to reflect his own
process of coming to terms with the material. The film is divided into
three sections: the first focuses on the history of shoeshining, the second
on the aspirations and ideals of the shoeshine men, and the third on rag
popping. Each section develops slowly, almost randomly, until the first-
person sections and the accompanying footage gradually achieve a
convincing unity. Greene thus shares, in an unpretentiously reflexive
fashion, his own excitement in discovering the connections among
thousands of feet of film and hours of interviews.
The first section of the film deals with the history of shoeshining.
Significantly, the primary speaker in this section is an Italian (the only
non-black shoeshine man to appear in the film). While the screen offers
various views of turn-of-the-century America, the Italian explains that
the first shoeshiners were Greek and Italian immigrants. Only as these
"new Americans" became assimilated into the mainstream did blacks,
primarily displaced field-hands and sharecroppers, move into
shoeshining. But the peculiar character of shoeshining dates from the
entry of blacks into the profession.
The treatment of shoeshine men as "boys," as one veteran sadly implies,
is no different from the man-child status of blacks during slavery.
Greene uses footage of cotton picking and riverboat unloading to stress
the connection between shoeshining and the Old South. For, as one of
the film's subjects later comments, the "porter" professions, including
shoeshining, were simply the North's way of dealing with the large-scale
northern movement of Southern blacks at the turn of the century, a way
of changing the appearance of racial relations without altering their
essentially oppressive nature. By focusing on these points, Greene
suggests that both the surplus labor that gave birth to such a
nonessential occupation and the social attitudes that made such
blatantly hierarchical encounters possible have their roots in the Old
South.
But at no point does the film move away from the concrete experience of
the shoeshine men. Historical reality takes an added meaning when seen
from the viewpoint of personal experience. Thus, the best analysis of the
movement of blacks into shoeshining is offered by one man who cares
little for historical forces: "I got hungry, that's how I got started. You get
hungry, you'll do anything, you know."
But the history of shoeshining is also a history of men refusing to
conform to the demands of the wage-labor system and refusing to
abandon their ties to the community. Although many of the men
interviewed seem defensive about the lack of status accorded
shoeshiners, all of them seem to value their independence more than
status. As one man proudly observes, "Nobody's looking over my
shoulder." The job also seems to allow for considerable interaction with
the community; in several cases the shoeshine stand serves as a center
for community activities. One would certainly not want to deny that the
relative independence of the shoeshine men is primarily a function of
their peripheral relation to the economy. But the men in AMERICAN
SHOESHINE value this independence, and transform it in many
different ways to reflect their own personalities and to project their own
values.
The second and longest section of the film is devoted to a series of
individual portraits of shoeshine men. The aim here seems to be to
explore, in a gentle but insistent way, the contradictions of the
shoeshine men's own thinking. By far the most revealing insight arises
from several of the older men who, while allegedly proud of their work,
refuse to let their sons take it up. The extent to which these men have
internalized the ideology of mobility is made devastatingly clear when
one man reports a conversation with his son. When the son asked if he
could shine shoes, the father responded, "If I ever hear talk of you gonna
shine shoes, I'll break your hands." Others acknowledge their acceptance
of middle-class thinking by the titles they insist upon — "boot black" or
"leather finisher." Still others seem to pride themselves on being able to
tell a person of "quality" by his shoes. Throughout this section one is
made aware of the tension between some sort of awareness of economic
realities, on the one hand, and a well-conditioned good humor, on the
other. Smiles bring tips and even when discussing serious matters,
Sparky Greene's shoeshine men smile.
But there are cracks in the smile — revealing cracks. One shoeshiner
observes that "big business" types are the worst tippers. Some even hold
a few dollars in their hands during the shine in an effort to get especially
good treatment. But when the time to pay comes, the shoeshine man is
lucky to get "fifteen cents." The tale of Beau Jack, a shoeshiner who
became a lightweight boxing champion, makes a similar point about "pie
in the sky." Whether shining a white man's shoes or boxing in a white
man's ring, Beau Jack gets only the share of the pie that others decide to
give him. When his career ended, Beau Jack found himself shining shoes
again; his managers had "taken all his money." The appearance of Beau
Jack in the film, his scarred face the only remaining testimony to his
boxing career, is more than pathetic. For when he comments that the
only thing he ever enjoyed besides boxing was shining shoes, Beau Jack
is in fact making an indirect but significant comment on the lack of
opportunities, the limitations, and the manipulation which black
Americans not only experience but often come to accept.
While the critical comments of the shoeshine men do not indicate or
imply recognition of their oppressive situation, they do suggest that at
least some of them are beginning to question the "smile" approach to
economic survival. The fact that several lament the steadily shrinking
number of shoeshine men also suggests that a concern for self-respect
and racial pride is driving young men away from shining shoes. But
Greene is uninterested in why people do not shine shoes. His concern is
with those who do, whatever their reasons and however inadequate their
analysis of their condition. This questionable focus, a concern with how
people cope with a situation rather than with how they can change it,
implies an acceptance of shoeshining as "interesting" or "quaint." It does
not, unfortunately, lead to any challenge of the vertical social relations
that support shoeshining.
In the third section of the film, Greene moves farther away from
questions of pride and consciousness and into a discussion and display
of rag popping. Rag popping is presented as a way of "coping." The
"turtle dance," the most sophisticated form of rag popping, seems to
have arisen as a way of getting bigger tips. "Pop the rag, they'll pop the
money in your pockets." But in an occupation which allows little
originality, rag popping became a form of personal expression, a way to
distinguish oneself from one's peers. But the manner of expression is
not neutral; rather, it is both personally and racially demeaning. The
various dances and routines connected with rag popping embody the
most vicious racial stereotypes. The principal "bug dancer" in the film
acts drunk and foolish while dancing to the beat of the rag. Two other
featured performers, Pork Chop and Kidney Pie, gained national
recognition for their rag popping numbers. But their attire and their
routine suggest that the real appeal of their act was in its insulting racial
humor.
Greene's one-sided treatment of the "art" of rag popping might be seen
as nothing more than an extension of the film's central preoccupation
with how to cope with a dreary situation. But when a veteran rag popper
talks about being called an Uncle Tom, the inherent weakness of
Greene's position becomes clear. For no matter how "artistic" or
gratifying an activity is, it cannot be treated independently of the social
relations it both reflects and maintains. The racial stereotypes (ranging
from "natural rhythm" to "devoted domestic"), reinforced by rag
popping, extend far beyond the world of the shoeshiners. No tip is big
enough to justify personal and racial debasement.
The weakness of the third section of AMERICAN SHOESHINE is the
direct result of the filmmaker's affection for his subjects. AMERICAN
SHOESHINE is the shoeshine men's film; Greene obviously felt that rag
popping was part of their story. But affection alone is not sufficient for
dealing with a complex social and economic situation. Working people
have always developed ways of making both work and the workplace
more bearable. Often these psychologically necessary diversions develop
into a form of their own. But activities like rag popping do not transform
relations of labor, they maintain them. The shoeshine men in
AMERICAN SHOESHINE have reason to be proud of their rag popping
skills, but they also have other, more basic reasons to be proud and
other, more significant struggles to engage in.
AMERICAN SHOESHINE is distributed by Perspective Films, 369 West
Erie Street, Chicago, IL 60610
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JUMP CUT
A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY MEDIA
38 Families. Redevelopment. Revolution Until
Victory. The Beginning of Our Victory
New from California Newsreel
by Bill Nichols
from Jump Cut, no. 17, April 1978, pp. 10-13
copyright Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, 1978, 2005
Since spring 1973 various members and former members of California
Newsreel (previously called San Francisco Newsreel) have produced
four films. A close look at these films will offer a better understanding of
the group's dynamic as well as a view of some of the problems and
successes of political filmmaking within the post-New-Left American
movement. These films have their greatest value in ongoing political
struggles to organize and mobilize working class and Third World
peoples. It is important to bear this in mind as a fundamental quality for
it places them in a different context than left-liberal films that circulate
predominantly in a middle class, educational context (colleges, high
schools, public libraries), such as IN THE YEAR OF THE PIG (Emile de
Antonio, 1968), GROWING UP FEMALE (Julia Reichert/Jim Klein,
1970), and I.F. STONE'S WEEKLY (Jerry Brack, Jr., 1976). In contrast,
the Newsreel films are more direct organizing tools, and the three I've
seen all have useful roles to play.
This is crucial. For whatever formal or stylistic flaws they have, they
nonetheless work politically. Many of the problems I raise about them
are problems that the films' intended audiences also raise. Other
problems relate to theoretical questions about political films in general.
As I discuss the films, I will be concerned with the broader question of
the aesthetics of political cinema, and the attempt to build a
revolutionary culture grounded in Marxist theory and dedicated to a
radical transformation of the status quo. Despite their flaws, these
Newsreel films play a role in this straggle.
The four films are 38 FAMILIES, REVOLUTION UNTIL VICTORY,
THE BEGINNING OF OUR VICTORY, and REDEVELOPMENT. £i]
Newsreel began work on 38 FAMILIES and REVOLUTION UNTIL
VICTORY prior to spring, 1973, but political upheaval in the group
delayed both films. The issues were very complex, but the net result was
that the majority of the members (mostly Third World) voted in
February, 1973, to purge four members of the leadership (all white), who
had moved close to or already joined the Revolutionary Communist
Party (a Maoist group, formerly the Revolutionary Union). [2] The
purged members formed Single Spark Films, allied themselves formally
with the RCP, completed REVOLUTION UNTIL VICTORY on their own,
and went on to make THE BEGINNING OF OUR VICTORY, a film I
have not yet been able to see.
Members of the remaining Newsreel majority had already completed 38
FAMILIES, but then fell inactive as members drifted away. In 1975,
Resolution Films, a group of five filmmakers, made REDEVELOPMENT
and began to distribute it in association with Newsreel. Several people
from Resolution and some people who had been recruited to Newsreel
after the 1973 split now run California Newsreel in San Francisco and
have recently expanded both production and distribution. They have
also established a branch in Los Angeles.
In many ways, 38 FAMILIES and REVOLUTION UNTIL VICTORY
reflect the enormous gap in filmmaking skills between leadership and
membership at the time of purge. The membership had little filmmaking
experience and little training inside Newsreel. Therefore 38 FAMILIES
has a number of flaws that limit its political value. Basically, the film
recounts the story of 38 families in Salinas, California who were evicted
from a trailer court when they joined a strike against the farm company
that also owned the court. All the families were Chicano and they
banded together, refusing to leave their homes. When the company
called in the police to evict the families, many of them set up a tent camp
in an abandoned lot across the street. After a period of continual
pressure on the city government, local officials allowed the families to
move into an abandoned Army camp where they were told the city
would provide decent housing within 90 days.
Although this series of events is relatively straightforward, it is actually
difficult to reconstruct accurately from the film. The participants
themselves tell much of the story in interviews (in Spanish, translated
voice-over). The film jumps back and forth in time from speakers
describing events to more cinema-verite-like coverage of actual events.
But the film does so without clarifying the relation of description to
events, sometimes alluding to central points such as the onset of the
strike in a passing phrase. The film resembles those of Emile de Antonio
or Cinda Firestone's ATTICA (1974) in its attempt to construct an
overview from sync interview material. But 38 FAMILIES is less
successful. The interviewees are all participants with similar points of
view, and this prevents the use of counterpoint and contrast such as
Firestone employs when she cuts from the McKay Commission hearings
to the Atttica inmates' testimony. The similar viewpoints in 38
FAMILIES compel the filmmakers to duplicate the omissions,
repetitions, emphases, and contextual understanding of the participants
rather than to formulate a broader interpretation of their own, as
Firestone and De Antonio consistently do. The result is a high degree of
confusion rather than clarification of issues.
Although the film doesn't draw more general conclusions from these
particular events, its greatest value lies in its explicit treatment of a
people and their struggle on levels that the mass media consistently
neglect. Because it is the direct address of the people involved in the
struggle, the interview material yields a strong sense of "being there." To
show how people who are living in the midst of a situation perceive and
articulate it can teach us how to communicate with other people in
similar situations. Yet a film needs a clearer political analysis in addition
to this basic rapport.
The makers of the film are aware of most of these shortcomings, which
they argue are symptomatic of their relationships with the purged
minority. During this time the more experienced members of Newsreel,
including those later purged, devoted themselves exclusively to work on
REVOLUTION UNTIL VICTORY to the neglect of other projects or
training others. Therefore the makers of 38 FAMILIES lacked guidance.
Furthermore they had no overall advance strategy. Consequently, the
film did not raise the political questions relevant to the Chicano
movement as a whole. The Third World members, some of whom were
Chicano, undertook the project in order to do something, to feel useful,
and because they thought their own Third World heritage would afford
them some measure of rapport with the people they filmed. How many
of the film's problems are directly attributable to the leadership at the
time is difficult to determine, but the political context of its making
certainly limited the film's political impact.
In contrast to 38 FAMILIES, REVOLUTION UNTIL VICTORY is one of
Newsreel's most ambitious and provocative films. Designed as a
compilation film in the tradition of the WHY WE FIGHT series overseen
by Frank Capra during World War II, REVOLUTION UNTIL VICTORY
has received appreciable attention and considerable use, especially by
Arab student groups, ft! It is also the last Newsreel effort by the purged
members, terminating a line of filmmaking continuity that extended
back to the group’s first film, OFF THE PIG (retitled BLACK PANTHER,
20 min., B&W, I968).
REVOLUTION UNTIL VICTORY sets out to provide an historical
account of the origins and goals of Zionism and to present the
alternative claims of the Palestinian refugees for access to their
homeland and their rights to self-determination. The film becomes very
complex. There is the relation between re-occupying a homeland and
establishing a socialist nation in the face of imperialism. There is the
tension between the Palestinian liberation movement and the Arab
governments themselves, which are often feudalistic and conservative.
There are the conflicting claims and strategies of different Palestinian
organizations. There is the diversity of organizational functions of which
military operations are but one. And there is the need to draw a clear
distinction between anti-semitism and anti-Zionism, a distinction which
Lenny Rubenstein argues in his review of the film, "may be impossible
to make without political rebellion in Israel." [4] (The film identifies
Zionism as a movement built upon class privilege, which has not
benefited all Jews equally by any means.)
The most distinctive feature of the film is undoubtedly its historical
orientation. This is rare in Newsreel films, which have generally
centered on contemporary events or processes with minimal attention to
historical background. Even in THE WOMAN'S FILM (40 min., B&W,
1971) on which some of the same people participated, historical
background appears in a brief montage sequence in the middle of the
film. Newsreel seems to have carried this concern with historical
background over into THE BEGINNING OF OUR VICTORY (on the
Farah strike), and this represents an invaluable addition to Newsreel's
approach.
In broad outline, REVOLUTION UNTIL VICTORY argues that Zionism
has been solely preoccupied with the creation of a Jewish homeland,
with the result that it has played into the hands of other nations'
imperialistic or unscrupulous counter-revolutionary interests. Zionist
activity, the film argues, involved collaboration with the Nazi regime and
aid to a relatively small number of German Jews who immigrated to
Palestine, at the expense of those without the means for such an escape.
Earlier Zionism involved appeals for British support, which played into
British desires indirectly to control this strategic area and displace
Turkish domination. More recently, Zionism has meant dependence
upon the United States, helping maintain an American middle-eastern
presence and providing U.S. investment with a lucrative internal
market.
The film makes these points by means of a voice-over narration. Several
different voices, male and female, narrate, effectively undercutting the
omniscient voice-of-God narrator and giving the impression that a
number of ordinary people have all arrived at the same conclusions. The
image track consists primarily of archival footage arranged to illustrate
the argument, which is clear and emotionally compelling. In fact,
viewing the film can be a very rousing experience, in much the same way
as viewing the WHY WE FIGHT films once was. REVOLUTION UNTIL
VICTORY provides an invaluable alternative to the mass media's
coverage of the Palestinian question and serves as an excellent
introduction to discussion and debate.
That at least some of that debate centers around the film itself and the
tactics it employs to achieve an emotional effect, namely its Manichean
sense of good (Palestinians) and evil (Zionists), is the film's main
drawback. This kind of melodramatic stereotyping seems more
acceptable in propaganda films than elsewhere (especially if you start
out agreeing with the basic premise). But it nonetheless seems at odds
with Marxism, which insists that morality does not determine social
conditions but vice versa. It isn't the unalterably cruel-hearted Zionists
who have brought misery to the Palestinians, but history and the clash
of hostile social formations that have produced the current situation in
the Middle East. We may wish to make value judgments about people's
responses to this historical situation, and, indeed, it would be hard not
to, but it is another thing to imply that morality, or immorality, created
it. This choice represents an idealist, religious view of the world, which
does indeed run the risk of confusing Zionism with Judaism, the
"contagion" with all potential carriers. It is only a short remove from the
classically right-wing propaganda tactic of guilt by association.
The filmmakers moralize in three considerably important ways. First,
the narrators use imitation German-Jewish accents to read the words of
Zionist leaders. In doing this, the film breaks down its own distinction
between Zionism and Judaism and sacrifices political distinctions to
emotional effect. At one point, however, the use of accents works
extremely well. Individuals describe, in voice-over with Jewish accents,
how the Zionists collaborated with the Nazi government whereas other
Jews joined the Resistance. The use of Jewish accents here stresses the
fact that not all Jews are Zionists and that Zionism followed policies
detrimental to many Jews. Had the use of accents been limited to this
one case, Newsreel would have made its point very effectively.
Second, the narration and supporting image track make frequent
reference to Zionist military atrocities associated with the creation of the
Israeli state and its subsequent expansion. For example, the film
mentions massacres at Deir Yassin (254 civilians killed) and Kfar
Kassim (43 civilians, including children, killed). A narrator tells us that
an Israeli court fined the Army one cent for the latter massacre. At this
point the only sound is the ringing clink of a penny falling on a table.
Other sequences reinforce this point by likening Israeli tactics to
American tactics in Vietnam.
Yet pointing out Zionist atrocities inadequately justifies the Arab cause.
Neither Zionists nor Palestinians would cease to support their cause
because of atrocities committed in its name. (Especially if the atrocities
are not systematic — part of the implication in the film is that they are.)
And since in the minds of many viewers, the most blatant atrocities have
been committed in the name of the Palestinian liberation movement, the
film's concentration on Zionist atrocities is disingenuous. The film does
not once refer to acts of Arab terror, offer any explanation for its place
within a larger strategy, or show why the mass media pay so much
attention to it, compared to Zionist acts of a similar nature. With this
particular approach, the film undercuts its own credibility. The tactic of
condemning the side guilty of atrocities worked far more effectively
against the U.S. war in Vietnam, but in the Middle East the issues of
terrorism and viewers' media-influenced predispositions are very
different and need to be dealt with honestly.
Finally there is a strong tendency to associate the Palestinian liberation
movement with its guerrilla wing and to valorize militarism as the most
emblematic aspect of the liberation struggle. Without clarifying the
question of military atrocities more adequately, this is a very risky
tendency at best. This emphasis also occurred throughout much of
Newsreel's earlier filmmaking, in their films on the Black Panthers, for
example. Such an emphasis is in distinct contrast to the relative de-
emphasis of militaristic values (vs. the necessity for armed struggle) in
the films on Third World liberation which Newsreel distributes. £5}
These films locate armed struggle in a concrete, historical context,
where values other than militarism provide the basic direction of
struggle. These films don't celebrate violence for its own sake but see it
as a transitional necessity which involves much sacrifice. In many
Newsreel films, violence was a personal and cathartic experience which
lacked extended, historical roots or clear political rationale. Many
Newsreel films tucked in an obligatory montage of armed struggle from
around the world, especially in the short "turn on" films, which were
designed to build morale. The message was less the role of violence in
social revolution as the ecstasy of violence as personal liberation.
Although Newsreel avoids the worst of these dangers in REVOLUTION
UNTIL VICTORY, the stress on armed struggle itself may be a function
of Newsreel's perception of the Palestinian conflict more than the
perception of the participants. The films about Third World liberation
struggles which Newsreel distributes but which other people made,
frequently emphasize, as dramatic highpoints, the articulation of
principles by spokespeople and depictions of what revolutionary cadre
do for those they liberate. This sometimes leaves the films flatter and
less emotionally rousing to a white North American audience, but they
are probably more indicative of the values and priorities found among
the liberation fighters themselves.
Lenny Rubenstein (whose review condemns the film as simply
inadequate) effectively summarizes many of the film's problems when
he states that REVOLUTION UNTIL VICTORY fails to question
"the components of their (the Palestinian liberation
movements) radicalism beyond military cadres and an
occasional showpiece workshop; the extent of activity
beyond military attacks; the rationale behind apparently
suicidal terrorist attacks; their relationship to the demands
of the Soviet Union's foreign policy, and their following
among the Palestinians who cannot quit their jobs to devote
themselves full time to the PLO." f 61
Indeed, the film treats the development of Zionism with far more clarity,
and certitude, than the liberation movement itself. The film
systematically identifies and criticizes the intentions and motivations of
the Zionist leaders, whereas it allows the statements of Palestinians to
stand unclarified and glosses over the relationships between different
aspects of the struggle. This leads to contradictory explanations of the
movement's goals as these two statements indicate:
"(An Arab boy says) We must liberate Palestine and make it
possible for all people to live in peace — Jews, Arabs, or
Christians. Our war is a war of liberation, it's not a war
against the Jews. We do not want to push them into the sea
... We also don't want them to push us into the desert; that is
why we must fight."
"(An Arab male adult says) The giant U.S. corporations and
banks have billions of dollars invested in the Arab countries.
They want to continue exploiting the Arab people. That is
why they are trying to suppress the revolution. As
Palestinians we are asking people to fight against
imperialism and its partners ... the reactionary Arab
regimes."
The film doesn't confront the degree to which these statements reflect a
division between national liberation and socialist revolution. The film
refuses to clarity differences in Palestinian strategy, preferring instead
to give a blanket, emotional endorsement to guerrilla organization and
an equally sweeping condemnation to Zionist policies.
For these reasons a great deal of the film's power lies in its ability to
arouse strong feelings for the Palestinians and against the Zionists. This
approach requires a certain amount of flattening of historical complexity
in order to stress emotional factors — Zionist scheming and Palestinian
resistance — that serve as the viewer's points of identification. An overly
simplified account of historical events is common to propaganda films
generally. We may wonder if its use here handicaps Newsreel's purpose
by promoting a non-dialectical, almost moralistic concept of history.
The very fact that the emotionally charged and biased argument is a
convention of propaganda films, however, may indeed be recognized as
precisely that. We may accept it as a convention in this context without
expecting to find justification for it outside of this context. Emotionally
charged and simplified accounts promote easy comprehension and
identification. On the other hand, leftist propaganda using this
convention is not very likely to help promote a genuinely Marxist
understanding of history whatever its other virtues.
Verbal statements are of great importance to a film like REVOLUTION
UNTIL VICTORY — to most political cinema in fact. Spoken language
provides a vehicle for criticism and self-criticism, communication and
meta-communication.
The latter, an examination of one's own assumptions or messages at
another level, has become an area of considerable theoretical interest for
both formal and political reasons. While a case can be made that such
self-reflexiveness is important to the overall development of a political
cinema, it is an activity far removed from the work of Newsreel and I
cannot effectively discuss it in this article without adopting an overly
speculative approach. But just the base level of criticism and
communication in REVOLUTION UNTIL VICTORY (omitting reflexive
operations), can serve as a focus for a few conclusions about structure in
the films.
l. Newsreel's reliance upon the traditional form of voice-over
commentary allows for contrapuntal interaction between word and
image. This provides a valuable flexibility and one which cinema-verite
emphasizing sync sound must replace — by other structures if the film is
to have an overall coherence.
2. Voice-over applies a logical grid to historical events and runs the risk
of oversimplification-into moral certitude, political dogmatism, and
teleological determinism. Fortunately, this is a potential risk and not an
absolute one. The style and content of the voice-over, leaving aside
meta-communicative techniques, can do much to avoid this danger as
can coupling voice-over to other forms of commentary. Multiplicity of
viewpoints itself can be important. Newsreel uses this tactic to great
advantage in REVOLUTION since the film's soundtrack divides itself
among several speakers as well as interview material. The mixture of
contemporary footage with historical analysis also subverts this risk by
reaffirming the indeterminacy of the present alongside the struggle to
shape a future guided by knowledge of the past.
REVOLUTION UNTIL VICTORY is one of Newsreel's most distinctive
films, especially in the sense of attempting to reach an unconvinced
audience rather than to reconfirm the views of the already convinced. As
such it is one of the few Newsreel films that develops a comprehensive
analysis and argument about a major struggle and one of the very few
that attempts such an analysis from an historical perspective. The film
not only shows how far and how fast Newsreel has come in its own
development; it also suggests how much the left itself has developed
since the days of the New Left's birth. Learning from strengths and
weaknesses helps provide a context for further change among all
cultural workers on the left.
Whereas REVOLUTION UNTIL VICTORY took the filmmakers far from
their own backyard (an excursion they were to repeat in THE
BEGINNING OF OUR VICTORY) REDEVELOPMENT, the only film to
be associated in any way with the remnant of the majority side in the
purge of 1973, deals very specifically with a problem centering in San
Francisco — urban renewal. Its overall structure is looser than
REVOLUTION UNTIL VICTORY and there is a stronger tendency to
linger over specific events or situations rather than constantly move
toward a more general overview. But this approach reveals both
advantages and disadvantages that make the film of particular interest.
REDEVELOPMENT covers a vast range of material (usually in the
words of actual participants) although it never fully resolves the
problem of integrating this material into a coherent whole. Like WE
DEMAND FREEDOM (55 min/B&W/ Third World Newsreel /1974), the
film's final impression is a sense of confusion, which seems to be a direct
function of the amount of material covered and the way in which the
filmmakers relate this material. A brief summary of what seem to be the
main sections of the film may help indicate both the strength of the film
and its problems:
1) The current problem of redevelopment (from the point of view of a
developer and a displaced resident).
2) How redevelopment of an area occurs over time in San Francisco.
• Use of the media to imply that the area is deteriorating arid
unsafe, followed by redevelopment plans and actions.
• Reactions of residents for whom the area remains viable even
though redevelopment cuts off its life blood-street life, social
gathering places, etc.
3) The context for redevelopment at a non-local level.
• The role of government in co-ordinating large scale reorganization
in land use as economic needs change.
• San Francisco's envisioned role as hub of Pacific Rim business, a
finance capital center.
4) Local resistance to the effects of this strategy.
• TOOR (Tenants and Owners in Opposition to Redevelopment).
• Protest marches, non-response by city government.
• Composition of TOOR and most other resistance groups is largely
immigrant, low-income, many former longshoremen and seamen
in particular.
5. More general traditions of class struggle in the Bay Area.
• 1934 general strike over union recognition.
• Union struggles against lettuce growers in Salinas.
6) The issue of community control.
• Pitfalls exemplified by local redevelopment agencies that
strengthen local pockets of wealth and power at people's expense
(investments of community churches, e.g., managed by high-paid,
outside advisors).
• The necessary overview: Engel's argument that redevelopment
helps rationalize and maximize profits; victory requires abolition
of capitalistic production.
7) Problems of urban transit.
• Functions of urban transit: shuttle workers from a distance and
increase land values along the transit route. (Example of high rises
clustered near exits of Toronto's subway system, related to
increased values in Mission District near BART (Bay Area Rapid
Transit) exits.
• Community response: businessmen see resistance as attempt to
discredit city, resist progress. Residents see transit as betrayal,
unresponsive to their needs.
8) Class structure in community organizing: petty-bourgeois organizing
tactics (reforms that do not prevent redevelopment) and the dissipation
of energy from basic issues. Citation of concrete examples in San
Francisco.
9) Overview of urban core renewal.
• Will BART aid the worker, the average person? Official answer:
yes, relieve congestion and pollution, attract new industry.
Narration's unofficial answer: no, will rationalize profits and
relations of production in finance center but will not provide jobs.
To the contrary, will squeeze even more workers out.
• The international economic picture from which to view mass
transit. Companies relocate overseas not because of lack of
adequate mass transit, but because of cheaper labor, political
"stability," and minimal worker organization. (Examples are based
on quotes from officials of Hewlett-Packard.)
to) The present dilemma: Live coverage of a meeting between residents
of Daly City, a suburb south of S.F., and the local government, ending
with the frustrated outcry of a woman protesting the lack of community
control: "What is the recourse for an oppressed majority?"
Some of the difficulties in integrating these sections into a single,
coherent argument may be apparent from the differences in scope and
level of argument between sections and the apparent arbitrariness of
their sequential arrangement. Note, for example, the similarity between
sections 4 and 6a or between 7 and 9. These difficulties do not undercut
the integrity of the individual sections, however. The film organizes
these sections in a crisp, efficient manner. Within sections the voices of
participants figure prominently. Their perceptions provide the sections
with internal organization and infuse them with credibility and everyday
understanding. REDEVELOPMENT resists the temptation to draw from
these perceptions a common thread which a voice-over narrator could
summarize, and the film thereby avoids the dangers of moralism and
determinism that surface in REVOLUTION UNTIL VICTORY.
Consequently, a much of the film's line of reasoning derives from
various participants' comments and their juxtaposition. Even though
these comments relate most strongly to other material within the same
section, they do not provide the thread for an overall argument. This
strength of local reference, the commentary's rootedness in specific
situations, gives a very strong sense of how issues "feel" to the
participants and how they are dealt with. The choice to give priority to
the local context, the situation within a given section of the film, need
not lead to overall diffuseness. What seems to make the overall structure
somewhat murky has more to do with the arrangement of sections in
relation to each other. The film simply attempts to cover too much
ground via a pattern that shifts levels and topics far more often than is
necessary. (Introducing a discussion of runaway corporations in section
9b is a good example: the point is valid and well-made, but its link to
urban transit does not seem to be its most distinctive feature. If
anything it relates better to 3a and 6b, sections dealing with the general
conditions of capitalist production that relate to urban redevelopment.)
REDEVELOPMENT lacks a singular point of view mediated by a single
textual code as REVOLUTION UNTIL VICTORY does in its historical
sections (via voice-over). The exact vantage point from which we
observe the process of redevelopment seems to shift as though the film
were trying to examine all its many facets without making any
assumption about which facet is most important or determining. There
is no political organization featured to provide leadership. This may well
be indicative of the relative lack of leftist commitment to issues such as
redevelopment during the period of the New Left. Redevelopment, like
the prison issue so heavily treated by Third World Newsreel (in New
York City), manifests itself most forcefully in the social fabric of the
community rather than at the point of production. Left groups with a
national organization have not given such issues the same degree of
importance as economic exploitation and point of production
organizing.
Usually, however, they do acknowledge the importance of the struggle
against barriers to working class unity, such as racism and sexism. It is
often left up to individuals in the community to act as best they can. For
example, BREAK AND ENTER (42 min., B&W, I970) also indicates how
protest against poor living conditions arises with those directly affected,
and thus the film shows the Young Lords, a community-based political
group, playing a secondary, support role.
REDEVELOPMENT fluctuates between an historical and a current
events point of view, between a contextual overview and an in-depth
examination of specific confrontations. Its greatest strength lies in the
analysis of specific aspects of a crucial problem with immediate
relevance for California Newsreel's local constituency. Its greatest
weakness lies in its failure to integrate these aspects into a coherent,
historical whole. In this case, reediting what has already been shot
would greatly enhance REDEVELOPMENT which is already of
considerable use. Its limitations only point to the need for ongoing
struggle on a unified front of theory and practice in both film production
and political action.
Notes
1. 38 FAMILIES (25 mm/color) is available in English and Spanish from
California Newsreel only. REVOLUTION UNTIL VICTORY (52
min/B&W/ 1973) was originally called WE THE PALESTINIAN
PEOPLE. Calif, and Third World Newsreel in New York both distribute
the film in English and Spanish versions. BEGINNING OF OUR
VICTORY (Single Spark. Films, 1975) was withdrawn from circulation
soon after its release although it has been screened a few times since
then. REDEVELOPMENT (Resolution Films, 1975/60 min/B&W) is
available from both Newsreels. California Newsreel, 630 Natoma Street,
San Francisco, CA 94101; Third World Newsreel, 26 W. 20th Street,
New York, NY 10011.
2u I have based my information about California Newsreel's internal
history on interviews with members of the majority side and access to
position papers developed by both sides. I have not been able to obtain
an interview with the purged minority.
3l In both New York and San Francisco the film was one of the most
widely distributed in 1974. Critical response ranged from high praise to
great disappointment. In a review in Cineaste, Lenny Rubenstein,
incorrectly calling the film WE ARE THE PALESTINIAN PEOPLE,
concluded, "Relying on the simplistic slogan of Third World struggle is
no longer enough to win an audiences support" (6:3,1974, p. 36). In
more recent years, however, the film has not been widely seen or
promoted.
4* Rubenstein, ibid.
5. Examples include EL PUEBLO SE LEVANTA (THE PEOPLE ARE
RISING/42 min/B&W/Eng&Sp/i97l), FALN (25 min/B&W/Dawn
Films, 1964), NIGERIA: NIGERIA ONE (45 min/B&W/Facts
Africa/n.d.), NOSSA TERRA (40 min/B&W/i97l), PROCLAMATION
OF THE NATION OF GUINEA-BISSAU (40 min/color I973-TW
Newsreel only).
(L Rubenstein, ibid.
To top Current issue Archived essays Jump Cut home
JUMP CUT
A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY MEDIA
Film and ideology
by John Hess
from Jump Cut, no. 17, April 1978, pp. 14-16
copyright Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, 1978, 2005
"It is clear that the arm of criticism cannot replace the
criticism of arms. Material force can only be overthrown by
material force; but theory itself becomes a material force
when it has seized the masses." — Karl Marx
"Social life is essentially practical. All mysteries which
mislead theory into mysticism find their rational solution in
human practice and in the comprehension of this practice."
— Karl Marx
I've found the concept of ideology useful in my work with commercial
films, but I have also found it difficult to explain in simple terms from a
Marxist perspective. I want here to present an introduction to the
concept, even at the risk of distortion by oversimplification. I hope to
provide a starting point for further study, and begin a discussion of
ideology per se in JUMP CUT. JjQ I begin with a working definition of
ideology, then quote a key passage by Marx which brings up the basic
issues. After I discuss these issues, I briefly put the following articles in
the context of the discussion.
Ideology is a relatively systematic body of ideas, attitudes, values, and
perceptions, as well as, actual modes of thinking (usually unconscious)
typical of a given class or group of people in a specific time and place. An
example is ruling class ideology in the USA today, often called bourgeois
ideology (It is important to point out that ruling class ideology and its
manifestations differ from country to country.). I must add four
significant qualifications to this definition.
First, Marx and Engels always considered the state, politics, education,
religion, the law and other activities not directly a part of material
production to be ideological forms or manifestations of ideology. Saying
this raises a question about the relation between these various
ideological forms, say, education, for example, and ideology per se. Does
our education system embody, manifest, reflect, express, disseminate, or
use ruling class ideology? These verbs describe a scale from a passive
relation to an active one. Unless we are to dismiss this question as a
linguistic trap, we have to answer yes all the way around. Schools use
bourgeois ideology to keep order — if students don't do well they will
"fail" in our competitive society. At the same time schools overtly teach
bourgeois ideology, for example the righteousness of the free enterprise
system. However, if we examine schools carefully, we can also see how
they covertly reflect and embody bourgeois values, for example, sexism
and racism.
Second, ruling class ideology tends to dominate in any given society
although it never does so completely. For example, a significant number
of Americans today reject the idea that big business is in their interests.
Also, while schools present a complete indoctrination in ruling class
ideology, blatantly in classes on our political and economic system, less
blatantly in the ways it encourages competition, individualism, and
sexism, many people end up rejecting all or part of that indoctrination.
Third, ideology presents an incomplete, inaccurate, distorted
understanding of social reality for two main reasons. Ideology
represents the interests and views of only one class although often
presenting them as universally true and valid. For example, the
educational system clearly discriminates against all but those with
money and power. While claiming to offer "equal opportunity" to all, the
system provides inferior education to minorities, women, and the poor.
In addition to representing class interests, ideology depends for its
clarity on the corresponding clarity of the social relations extant in the
society.
By social relations I mean the way in which a society organizes itself to
produce, divide up, and use a surplus of goods beyond what's needed for
subsistence. Have people divided themselves into extended families,
tribes, classes? Who owns the land, the tools, and the other resources?
Who does the work and how are they rewarded for it? The important
question is, then, how clear are these relations. Under capitalism they
are not clear at all. For example, while social mobility, getting ahead by
hard work, personal responsibility for one's place in society, are all
important ideas in bourgeois ideology, a hope held out to all, capitalism
depends upon a large work force with no other way to earn a living than
to work for the capitalist class. Since only a few can be a capitalist or
make themselves independent under capitalism, social mobility, getting
ahead, is not a significant reality for most people.
Fourth, although we can talk about ruling class ideology in general, each
specific expression of it — ideas, the legal system, the state, movies,
ethnic group ideology — is mediated. By mediated I mean that between
the general ideology and its expression comes individual and group
thoughts, experiences, creativity, needs, and so forth. For example,
Hollywood films generally convey bourgeois ideology, but not solely or
purely. Directors, actors and actresses, writers, the needs of audiences at
a given moment all mediate between an aspect of the general ideology —
say individualism — and a film, such as GODFATHER II. The dynamic
and the appeal of this film lie partially in the tension between extreme
individualism, represented by Michael, and Italian ethnic cohesiveness,
represented by the family. The appeal of many American films lies in
their attacks on certain aspects of bourgeois ideology and life.
In this sense, many Hollywood films have progressive elements, which
arise from contradictions between aspects of bourgeois ideology
(individualism and ideas about the family) and between bourgeois
ideology and life under capitalism.
The following quote from Marx's "Preface to A Contribution to The
Critique of Political Economy ," [l] one of his most famous statements,
raises the crucial issues about ideology. I will draw out and discuss these
issues.
"In the social production of their existence, people inevitably
enter into definite relations, which are independent of their
will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given
stage in the development of their material forces of
production. The totality of these relations of production
constitutes the economic structure of society, the real
foundation, on which arises a legal and political
superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of
social consciousness. The mode of production of material life
conditions the general process of social, political and
intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of people that
determines their existence, but their social existence that
determines, their consciousness. At a certain stage of
development, the material productive forces of society come
into conflict with the existing relations of production or —
this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms — with
the property relations within the framework of which they
have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the
productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then
begins an era of social revolution." [2]
For Marx and Engels, the first fact of human existence is the production
of the necessities of life: food, clothing, and shelter. In order to
accomplish this production, people enter into social relations "which are
independent of their will." Since history does not stop, we don't get a
chance to sit down and figure this all out ahead of time. It takes place
over long periods of time; for example, it took capitalist relations
hundreds of years to develop in Europe.
These relations of production — the way a society organizes itself to
produce its needs — which people enter into (or better, find themselves
in) are independent of their will because each of them is born into a
given situation, into a specific family, class, ethnic group, time and
place. None of us can choose these things. Before we even have the
capacity to make independent decisions, our family, schools, churches,
and other formal institutions have contributed greatly to our
socialization, have indoctrinated us in bourgeois ideology.
Marx's assertion that an ideological "superstructure" arises upon "the
economic structure of society" has become very controversial. Because
Marx uses words like "structure" and talks of "arising on a foundation,"
many have visualized the relationship between base and superstructure
as one between the basement or foundation of a house and the upper
floors. In some mechanical applications of these concepts, such an
image is, in fact, asserted as what Marx intended. Marx's own phrasing,
some sloppy reading, and especially dogmatic and mechanical
applications of these concepts have led many who otherwise consider
themselves Marxists to reject this way of conceiving the relationship as
rigidly determinist.
According to this rejection, Marx here asserts that only economic life or
activity constitutes reality while ideas, consciousness, the law, or politics
are all figments of people's imagination, having no reality or
importance. I too would find the image of a house with economics in the
basement, politics and the state on the first floor, law and religion on the
second, and art perched precariously on the roof silly and incorrect. But
it seems very clear to me that this is not at all what Marx intended or
said.
To begin with the economic base includes the "totality of these relations
or productions." The capitalists own the means of production (tools, raw
materials, land, factories) and the workers receive a wage for their time
on the job. The totality of economic life (production, distribution,
exchange, and consumption) includes our conscious as well as our
unconscious participation in it. As one commentator explains it,
"When Marx insists that being ... is independent of the
consciousness which reflects it, what he is getting at is not
that human production occurs without thought, but that
what happens in the world of production occurs
independently of what people may happen to think is
happening." [3]
The distinction is not between unconscious economic activity, on the
one hand, and consciousness, on the other, but between our conscious
activity in production and what we or anyone else thinks about that
activity. Throughout history, the difficult thing has been to explain
accurately human production. Few have even tried. The law, the state,
religion, ideas, attitudes are the ideological forms in which people think
about and try to change their conscious activity in production.
In the second part of the sentence I am discussing, Marx raises a second
controversial point having to do with the relationship between base and
superstructure. What does it mean to say that "definite forms of
consciousness" correspond to the economic base? What is the nature of
the correspondence between them? Here I must repeat what I said
about historical time. Soon after the passage I've quoted, Marx says,
"The Asiatic, ancient, feudal, and modern bourgeois modes
of production may be designated as epochs marking progress
in the economic development of society."
He is talking about very broad segments of time, epochs, not a few years
or decades. Marx does not say that every time unemployment changes
or the stock market twitches, different movies or laws are made. He says
rather that to each of the major modes of production "correspond
definite forms of social consciousness."
To talk about film and ideology today creates a problem in that we have
narrowed the scope considerably. We concern ourselves with the
relation between a certain relatively short period of capitalism in one
country and the ideology and film of the same time period. Perhaps
because of the difficulty involved, the knowledge, new methodology, and
precision needed, the relation between the style and content of films and
20th century capitalism remains virtually unexplored. [4] For the, most
part in JUMP CUT writers have dealt with the relationship between
films on the one hand, and superstructural phenomena, on the other:
politics, racism, sexism, individualism. To go beyond this, we need to
discuss the possible relation between the patterns of racism and sexism
in the workplace as well as changes in the working class generally, and
the way people are portrayed in films. What, for example, is the relation
between BLUE COLLAR and ROCKY, and changes in patterns of racism
in the working class and on the job?
Marx and Engels clearly saw a reciprocal relationship between base and
superstructure. It's important to point out that Marxists understand
things to be integrated structures, to be functioning wholes. However
one understands the relationship between base and superstructure, we
must realize that they are an integrated whole and cannot be separated.
In later life, Engels felt compelled to defend Marx's view against the
mechanical interpretations and applications by some younger Marxists
as well as by opponents.
"The economic situation is the basis, but the various
elements of the superstructure — political forms of the class
struggle and its results,... especially the reflections of all
those real struggles in the brains of the participants ... also
exercise their influence upon the course of the historical
struggles and in many cases determine their form in
particular. There is an interaction of all these elements in
which the economic movement is finally bound to assert
itself." [5I
Marx explains (or better shows us where to look for) the relation
between base and superstructure. The realm of production, he says,
"conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life."
Because ideology is unreliable, because it mystifies social relations, we
must ask ourselves what conditions exist in the capitalist mode of
production that contribute to this mystification of consciousness. Marx,
in Capital and in many other writings, takes the analysis of capitalist
production as his central topic, so I can only scratch the surface here.
Class rule, division of labor, alienation, and fetishism constitute the four
main, completely interrelated, aspects of this mystification. In bourgeois
society, ideology functions primarily to reinforce these aspects of
capitalism and to disguise as natural, inevitable, and even as people's
own fault capitalism's devastating effects on people.
CLASS RULE
"The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling
ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of
society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force." [6]
The ruling class controls the "means of mental production" — they
control the media, the schools, etc., and can hire ideologists to operate
them. Thus, few Americans actually come in contact with left views on a
regular basis. And when left ideas appear in the dominant media, they
are usually ridiculed or grossly distorted. This does not mean that
bourgeois ideology consists of false ideas about the world foisted on an
unsuspecting people by a ruling class who knows they are false. Not at
all. The ruling class believes and fights for its ideas. And the ruling class
has the power and ability "to represent its interests as the common
interest of all the members of society,... as the only rational, universally
valid ones." £zl
Other classes accept ruling class ideas to the extent they seem to make
sense of social reality and help people live in our culture. In this sense
an idea, such as extreme individualism, "works" in a bourgeois society —
for some it works well, even though in the long run it doesn't solve the
most pressing personal and social needs. "Dog eat dog" has some
validity in a competitive society, but works well only for a few top dogs.
But notice, too, what is hidden or omitted by such individualism — the
idea that people could rise together as a class. Ideology is not simply the
expression of some ideas; it is also the repression or omission of others.
Thus it works overtly and covertly.
DIVISION OF LABOR
"For as soon as the distribution of labor comes into being,
each person has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity,
which is forced upon him/her and from which he/she cannot
escape. A person is a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd, or a
critic, and must remain so if he/she does not want to lose
his/her means of livelihood." £81
The existence of social classes already implies a division of labor
between ordering and doing. Furthermore, fixing people into exclusive
areas of activity, and Marx includes sex roles here, narrows them, lets
them experience only a small portion of social activity, inhibits their
ability to grasp the totality of the system. The status of various positions
and roles attaches to the people who are forced into them. White-collar
work usually has higher status than blue collar, for example. Division of
labor touches all aspects of life: the boring routine detail work in factory,
office, and home, the isolated academic department, the split between
filmmakers and film critics.
The division of labor between mental and manual work tends to strip
most workers of any mental activity at all. [q] Meanwhile intellectuals
often remain very distant, often purposely above the day-to-day life of
ordinary people. They often appear to think that their ideas have a life of
their own beyond the need for any political practice, fiol
ALIENATION
To be alienated means to be estranged, separated from, deprived of
something. Marx lays out four ways workers are alienated under
capitalism. They do not own the means of production (factories, land,
machines, raw materials); they have no say over their work and often
don't see enough of the whole process to understand it; they do not deal
collectively with one another but individually with an employer; and
they compete with each other. For these reasons, workers are alienated
from the product of their labor, from the activity itself, and from each
other. Because, for Marx, productive activity, the way we produce the
necessities of life, is the key to human existence (as opposed to animal
existence), alienation from this whole process means that we are not
fully human — we are alienated from our very humanness.
On the one hand, bourgeois ideology presents an elaborate defense of
these relations of production, of private property, individualism,
competition, free enterprise, the naturalness and inevitability of
capitalism, usually blaming the kind of behavior that results from
alienation (the basic content of many news programs — crime, violence,
and addiction) on the victims. On the other hand, the dehumanization of
people under capitalism makes if very difficult for them to grasp and
fight the system that oppresses them. Born into an alienated society, we
tend to see it as inevitable, the way things are.
FETISHISM
When we agree with the capitalists that machines demand certain things
of workers, that money earns interest, that workers enter into a fair
contract with capitalists, we are giving our own creations (machines) the
power to dominate us and we are taking parts of things (the actual
contract between capital and labor) and abstractions (the relation
between money and interest) for the whole thing. This is how fetishism
works. Marx drew the concept of fetishism from the analysis of religion
by the German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach. Fetishism endows gods,
the creations of the human mind, with power to effect and even
dominate our lives, fill
We have created machines, even industry itself, yet we talk about their
needs, their demands on us, without realizing that it is within our power
to make them conform to our needs. If we believe that the capitalists
and the workers bargain in equality, it is only because we have failed to
fully examine the relation between them. As the current coal strike
shows, the ruling class is willing to use massive armed force to make
people work for them on their terms. Their use of this force against
workers has a long history. Is this kind of effort made to ensure that
mines are safe? Only the united force of most working people can equal
that of the capitalists.
So far in the passage we are examining Marx has pointed out those
aspects of historical development which most rigidly determine
(determine means "place limits on" not "cause") human activity and
consciousness. But history is not static. Conflicts and contradictions are
an important part of its very existence and dynamic. At first, in the
development of a given mode of production, the newly developing
relations of production greatly liberate productive forces. Capitalism,
bringing the industrial revolution in its wake, had this liberating effect
in 18th and 19th century Europe. However, once these relations'
liberating capacity had spent itself, they became a hindrance to
production. The fact that the government pays farmers not to produce,
that every year farmers destroy produce, milk, even animals in order to
keep the price up, that factories rarely if ever produce near capacity and
often stand idle, that only massive arms manufacturing and sales abroad
keep our economy afloat at all — these wasteful aspects of capitalist
productionn show how production for profit fetters productive as well as
human development in our society today.
As long as there are conflicting classes, as long as some people exploit
others, as long as there is a social division of labor, as long as alienation
and fetishism exist, society will be riddled with contradictions, which
will continually lead to eras of social revolution. At the very basis of
capitalism is the contradiction between the working class, which needs
the highest possible wages to sustain itself and provide some security,
and the capitalist class, which sees these wages as costs to be kept as low
as possible. As a result of the contradictions between the working class
and the capitalist class, there is class struggle, not just over wages,
where it most obviously manifests itself, but for control of society itself.
The existence of this class struggle implies a number of important things
about ideology. First, we cannot see ideology as total, as completely
dominating people. Clearly, the more intense class struggle becomes, the
less the working class accepts bourgeois ideology. In France and Italy
millions of workers have joined parties dedicated to overthrowing
capitalism and instituting socialism of some kind. If workers were
totally dominated by bourgeois ideology, there would be no unions,
strikes, or revolutions. Class struggle takes place in all areas of life: for
example, in the struggles for better schools, health care, housing, and
jobs; and in struggles against racism and sexism. Marx, just after the
passage I have quoted, refers to the "ideological forms in which people
become conscious of this conflict and fight it out." And the struggle
against bourgeois ideology is the struggle to provide people, in whatever
area of life they are active, with the tools to analyze more clearly the
world around them so that they can change it. As part of that struggle,
we must come to understand as clearly as we can where ideology comes
from, how it functions in society, how people respond to it, and how to
combat it. This effort unites these articles and much of the work in
JUMP CUT.
In his article James Linton discusses what he calls the "film-as-
entertainment" ideology," and goes on to show how it — the use of
fictional narrative and the establishment of identification in films —
"protects the dominant ideology from serious examination while at the
same time reinforcing its basic tenets." Michael Rosenthal, examines the
relationship between ideology and the social and economic relations
that Marx says determine it.
Discussing the specific case of the coming of sound and color, Edward
Buscombe tries to work out the extent to which film economics and the
needs of a dominant Hollywood ideology — realism — are responsible
for these changes in film technology. Finally, Tom Powers examines a
specific case of sexism in Howard Hawks' HIS GIRL FRIDAY, which
many critics have long seen as a strong and positive women's film. His
examination of the subtle sexism in the film will help us better analyze
contemporary films.
Notes
I want to thank the other editors of JUMP CUT for their help in working
on this introduction, and especially my close friend Sy Adler, whose
wisdom and good sense have been a special help.
n My reviews of GODFATHER TT (JUMP CUT 7) and BORN TO KILL
(JUMP CUT 10/11) dealt with issues of ideology. I would also
recommend reading Chuck Kleinhans' "Contemporary Working Class
Heroes." in JUMP CUT 2, our articles on JAWS in JUMP CUT q and
10/11 . on violence against women in JUMP CUT 14, and the special
sections on theory in JUMP CUT 12 /13 and on gays in JUMP CUT 16 . In
fact, most articles and reviews in JUMP CUT deal with some aspect of
ideology.
2^ (NY: International Publ., 1970), p. 20. After examining the original
German, I have decided to update the translations I use of Marx and
Engels. They almost always use the word Mensch/Menschen, which
means person/people, but is always translated as man/men. They would
understand.
3. John Hoffman, Marxism and the Theory of Praxis (NY: International
Publ., 1975), p. 111 .1 found this book an excellent discussion of the
questions I am discussing although it has problems that cannot be
overlooked.
4. Before he died, Charles Eckert was doing fine work in this area and
was just beginning to get results. See "The Anatomy of a Proletarian
Film: Warner's MARKED WOMAN," Film Quarterly, 27 (Winter 1973-
74) and "Shirley Temple and The House of Rockefeller." JUMP CUT,
No. 2 (1974).
5^ Engels to Joseph Bloch, September 21,1880, Karl Marx and Frederick
Engels, Selected Correspondence, 1844-1895, 3rd rev. ed. (1955;
Moscow: Progress Publ., 1975), p. 394.
6, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology (NY:
International Publ., 1970), p. 64.
ru Ibid., p. 65.
Sx Ibid., p. 53.
9^ Harry Braverman has written the best description and analysis of
what the division of labor means in people's lives. See Labor and
Monopoly Capital (NY: Monthly Review Press, 1974).
10. See our editorial on theory and practice in JUMP CUT 10/11.
11. See Capital I, Chapter 1, Section 4, "The Fetishism of Commodities
and the Secret Thereof."
To top Current issue Archived essays Jump Cut home
JUMP CUT
A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY MEDIA
But it's only a movie
by James Linton
from Jump Cut, no. 17, Appril 1978, pp. 16-19
copyright Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, 1978, 2005
U.S. film producers and film executives defend themselves against
attacks on the moral degeneracy or aesthetic crudeness (or whatever
alleged shortcoming) of the movies with a notable consistency. In 1950,
Eric Johnston, then head of the Motion Picture Producers Association of
America, articulated this defense in response to Norman Cousins' attack
on American movies. Cousins (1950) argued that Hollywood was
working against the public interest by "portray[ing] Americans in
exported films as a nation of slap-happy, triggerhappy dolts whose main
concern in life is where the next drink or murder is coming from."
Cousins contended that such a picture assisted in the Russian
propaganda effort to convince the rest of the world that Americans are
"selfish, depraved, ruthless, acquisitive, anti-humanitarian and anti-
cultural."
In replying, Johnston described the Hollywood product as
"Light and frothy musicals. Comedies. Yes, and some
'bangbang' pictures, too, in which rustlers bite the dust when
the brave cowboys take after them. Fun stuff. Escape stuff."
As to the charge that American films assisted the Russian propaganda
war, Johnston observed, "The world is fed up with propaganda. It is the
absence of conscious propaganda in our films that foreigners like."
Hollywood, Johnston claimed, was doing a good job making films of
"entertainment devoid of ideological lecturing and sermonizing."
Red Skelton offers another component of this defense in an ironic
remark delivered on national television, on the occasion of Columbia
Studio founder Harry Cohn's funeral. Before the two thousand people
who had filled sound stages 12 and 14 at Columbia Studios to attend the
gaudy funeral, Skelton observed: "Well, it only proves what they always
say — give the public what they want to see, and they'll come out for it"
(French, 1971).
We can characterize the combined elements of the defense which film
producers employ to rationalize their activities as ideological in the
sense that they "constitute a set of closely related beliefs, attitudes and
values characteristic of a group or community" (Plamenatz, 1970). JjQ
Plamenatz distinguishes among ideologies in terms of spread (i.e. the
sort or the size of the group or community who share an ideology),
comprehensiveness (i.e. the proportion of total ideas, attitudes and
values an ideology covers), and explicitness (i.e. the extent to which the
ideology is theoretically developed and consciously articulated). While it
might appear that the film-as-entertainment ideology is confined to the
producers of movies, it actually encompasses the vast majority of the
audience as well, as the data on audience motivation would indicate
(Opinion Research Corporation, 1957). It concerns only one portion of
reality (the production and consumption of dramatized symbolic
material), however, and is not fully articulated as a theory or doctrine.
The film-as-entertainment ideology, then, is widespread, but partial and
implicit.
One might question the concentration on the filmic version of the
entertainment ideology when it is clear that television is a much more
pervasive and powerful medium of communication and entertainment.
Film has a much longer history than television, of course, and film
executives have had to invoke this defensive ideology much more often,
given the numerous times individuals and groups have criticized the
moves over the 8o-odd years of their existence (Jowett, 1976; Jowett,
Reath and Schouten, 1976). As a result, film executives have been the
most prominent in articulating this entertainment ideology (i.e. making
it explicit). Television executives and performers have been less
vociferous in defending themselves against such attacks, but when they
have spoken out they have tended to employ similar rationales (Baldwin
and Lewis, 1971; Kaufman, 1976).
Researchers, however, have more fully documented evidence of the
widespread audience acceptance of the entertainment orientation for TV
than for film (CBC, 1975; LoSciuto, 1971).
What are the tenets of the film-as-entertainment ideology, then? In
broadest outline, this ideology posits that films are non-ideological.
More specifically it claims (as David Kunzle [1975] observes of the
apologists for Disney comics) that films "made in 'innocent fun'... are
socially harmless." Films are simply vehicles for allowing the tired
citizen to relax, enjoy him/herself and escape from the care of the
workaday world by exercising his/her imagination. They share in what
Herbert Schiller (1973) describes as the
"one central myth [that] dominates the world of fabricated
fantasy; the idea that entertainment and recreation are
value-free, have no point of view, and exist outside, so to
speak, the social process."
Extending this perspective leads to the identification of many positive
social and psychological functions provided by entertainment
(Mendelsohn, 1966). And if all else fails, there is always the claim that
they are "just giving people what they want" anyway.
The importance of "enjoyment" in this conceptualization of film-as-
entertainment suggests that films emphasize experiences and subjects
which are pleasant. The tremendous popularity of films such as THE
EXORCIST, JAWS and the recent wave of disaster movies should dispel
that simplistic notion rather quickly, however. An understanding of the
attraction of rather unpleasant and, in some instances, downright
disturbing subjects requires a wider notion of "entertainment." Herbert
J. Gans (1957) supplies such a wider notion by defining entertainment
as the satisfaction of "various latent needs or predispositions. "Jjz] The
crucial point to note here is that the needs or predispositions are latent,
they exist and are fulfilled below the level of conscious awareness. In
this sense, then, film viewing is analogous to dreaming as formulated by
Freud (1923): In the dream the psychic self renounces the external
world and the principle of reality which dominates it. As a result, the
dream will express in some form the wishes that in normal life remain
opposed by the conscious world. Christian Metz (1975) also draws an
analogy between cinema-going and dreaming:
"For the vast majority of the audience, the cinema (rather
like the dream in this) represents a kind of enclosure or
'reserve' which escapes a fully social life although it is
accepted and prescribed by it: going to the cinema is one licit
activity among others with its place in the admissible
pastimes of the day or the week, and yet that place is a 'hole'
in the social cloth, a loophole opening on to something
slightly more crazy, slightly less approved than what one
does the rest of the time."
Film viewers, then, have latent desires to be frightened, horrified and so
on, and some films cater to such latent desires. In addition, however, the
viewer does not want to be overly frightened or horrified. In other
words, the viewer wants to leave the theatre in a basically pleasant, or at
least non-agitated state of mind. 1 A 1 The method whereby the filmmaker
accomplishes this cathartic effect (in the Aristotelian sensefqj) is as
impressive a feat of cinematic "magic" as is any special effect, and a
description of the process goes a long ways toward providing an
understanding of the ideological impact of the medium.
The pervasiveness of the notion of the entertainment film as a value-free
and innocuous cultural product has already been mentioned. When
people approach film in this manner, they tend to lower their "psychic
guard," unlike the resistance they would exhibit if the films were
approached or presented as "propaganda," or probably even as
"education." The physical aspects of the viewing situation make us even
less resistant. The darkened theatre, with the heightened intensity of
message stimuli and increased sense of social isolation that it creates,
and our relaxed posture, combine to make the message more
emotionally potent and we are more emotionally susceptible to such
stimuli (Tudor, 1969). Metz stresses the conditions surrounding cinema
viewing that make it voyeuristic in the psychoanalytic sense.
Finally, films usually cover vast expanses of space and usually condense
large time periods into 90 to 120 minutes. Moreover, they do so in a
manner which conceals the episodic nature of the events, giving rather a
sense of continuity and unity, of the unceasing flow of time and the
unquestioned contiguity of space. The methods by which these results
are accomplished deserve closer scrutiny.
Films are characterized by the predominance of the "story film," or the
"traditional narrative" as it has come to be known. Films can (and do)
encompass a wide range of techniques, styles and subject matters, from
cinema verite documentaries to abstract films emphasizing color, shape,
rhythm and so on. The most widely exhibited and most popular films,
however, tend to be the ones which have "stars" playing characters, who
become involved in events that are strung together in a basically
chronological order, normally referred to as "the plot." Furthermore,
filmmakers structure these traditional narratives according to classical
dramatic principles. The opening exposition gives way to the
complication, in which the problem or difficulty central to the narrative
unfolds, and the situation finally turns to the favor of the forces of good
at the climax, after which the loose ends of the plot thread(s) are tied
together rather rapidly in the denouement. In other words, narrative
films employ the curve of rising and falling action, and have a definite
beginning, middle and end, which (contrary to Jean Luc Godard's
dictum) occur in that order (Metz, 1974).
The object of the filmmaker, then, becomes one of persuading us to
cross the distance that separates us from the screen and to imaginatively
enter the space of the screen world, experiencing vicariously the events
that occur within that world. This is where the emotional aspect of film
becomes important. The vicarious involvement affects us both
physiologically and emotionally. For example, as the unidentified man
carrying a knife stalks the unsuspecting young woman through the
jagged patterns of shadow and light in the deserted city streets, we
experience fear for her fate, our heart rate increases, and our palms may
become sweaty and so on.
How do filmmakers obtain this vicarious involvement in the flow of
events? There are two principle factors involved: displacement of
attention from medium to message (if you will) and identification with
stars, characters and situations.
The desire to have the spectator "enter" the film (to a certain extent at
least) can probably account for the narrative form's attraction to the
filmmaker and for the particular manner in which the narrative is
presented. John Fell (1974) believes,
"In the motion pictures there surfaced an entire tradition of
[a continuity] narrative technique which had been
developing unsystematically for a hundred years [in such
diverse areas as theater, print, optical amusements, 'shows'
and graphics]."
The narrative form had originally "developed to guarantee unflagging
interest by omitting the "dead spots" of other drama, enlisting
identifications with the performers and refining resources of suspense."
Film perfected these functions.
Furthermore, the relation between the two components of the narrative
is significant. Flanet (1974) delineates them by applying Genette's
general approach to narrative structure to films. A narrative film is a
combination of "what is being told" (i.e. the story/plot, or the diegesis)
and the "how of the telling" (i.e. the process or method of narration). A
central characteristic of narrative films, in this regard, is their general
tendency to mask their process of narration in favor of emphasizing the
plot or story (Metz, 1975). The conscious aim of the narrative film, then,
is "to eliminate intrusive camera presence and prevent a distancing
awareness in the audience ... [Without such an approach] fictional
drama cannot achieve reality, obviousness and truth" (Mulvey, 1975).
Film technology, and the particular ways in which it is employed in
narrative films, contributes greatly to this masking of the method of
narration. As Mulvey (1975) observes:
"Camera technology (as exemplified by deep focus in
particular) and camera movements (determined by the
action of the protagonist), combined with invisible editing
(demanded by realism) all tend to blur the limits of screen
space."
In other words, filmmakers orchestrate the action of their actors,
compose and photograph images and join shots together in the editing
process in such a manner as to hide the technical and stylistic means
used to achieve certain responses. Our attention is riveted on the story
and we are deeply involved with the characters in the film and in the
sequence of situations in which these characters find themselves. For
these reasons, the technical and stylistic means are transparent to us.
This brings us to a consideration of the second basic factor involved in
bridging the space between the audience and the screen: identification.
Film theorists have invoked identification in various guises from the
very beginning (Dart, 1975). Unfortunately, however, there have been
very few empirical attempts to study the dynamics of the phenomenon,
and pronouncements have tended to remain at the level of speculation
(Maccoby, 1968). Generally, "identification" has been conceptualized as
"putting oneself in the place of' or "empathizing with" one or more
characters in the film. It has been "measured by indications of emotional
attachment or liking," (Clark, 1971) and two principal forms which have
been recognized are similarity identification and wishful identification
(Feilitzen and Linne, 1975). In the former, we identify with those
characters most like ourselves, while in the latter, identification occurs
with those we want to be like.
The phenomenon is much more complicated than most theoretical
formulations have presented it, and the typology Andrew Tudor (1974)
presents is most useful in this regard. Two types of "star-individual
identification" are combined with two different "consequences" to
produce a four-fold classification: emotional affinity, self-identification,
imitation (of physical and simple behavioral characteristics) and
projection. "Emotional affinity" is the weakest and probably the most
common, and Tudor describes it as follows:
"The audience feels a loose attachment to a particular
protagonist deriving jointly from star, narrative and the
individual personality of the audience member: a standard
sense of involvement."
Tudor finds this form of identification "subject to rapid and extensive
variation."
In the next strongest category, "self-identification," "the audience
member places himself in the same situation and persona of the star."
"Imitation," the third category, is most prevalent among the young. In
this form of involvement, "consequences are no longer limited to the
immediate cinema-going situation, the star acting as some sort of model
or the audience." This category shades over into the final, most intense
and diffuse form of involvement: projection. In this form, "the person
lives his or her life in terms bound up with the favoured star." The star,
in effect, "becomes a receptacle for the projected desires, frustrations,
and pleasures of the fan." Projection is most prevalent in adolescents, a
group which is "most likely to grasp at the models provided by the star
system as a way of forming a sense of identity and a social reality." This
approach also seems more prevalent among female rather than male
adolescents. Tudor says that "our societies provide a very different
socialization experience for girls than that offered for boys." Females are
generally raised to be passive. "Reliance on vicarious outlet through
[identification in] the movies must be described as passive and
dependent" (Anast, 1967).
Tudor observes that there are also elements of involvement with story
type although it is almost solely at the level of emotional affinity. Such
involvement is realized through the existence of film genres.
"To see a movie made within a clearly recognized genre, such
as the western or the horror movie, is to participate in a
familiar locale and development, and this familiarity
facilitates easy and immediate involvement."
The individual star (as well as the story type to a certain extent) is
clearly important, then, in integrating the film viewer into the screen
world. Even if a genuine "star" is not present in a film, it does not follow
that identification does not occur. Film viewers also identify with non¬
celebrity actors as a result of the actor's characterization of an individual
immersed in specific situations. (An element of this exists in
identifications with celebrities as well.) It is in this regard that one must
study such things as point-of-view, since its structure "is a mechanism
whereby we experience contemporaneously with a character" (Branigan,
1975 ).
Nick Browne (1975) provides an even more interesting formulation. To
the triangle of spectator position, camera point of view and a character's
perspective (i.e. the normal notion of identification), one must add an
identification "with a character's position in a certain situation." [5] This
means,
"The way we as spectators are implicated in the action is as
much a matter of our position with respect to the unfolding
of those events in time as in their representation from a
point of space."
And ultimately, Browne claims, the structures through which the
spectator is so implicated in the action "convey and are closely allied to
the guiding moral commentary of the film." In others words, the
meaning which a film conveys operates in the moral, normative or
ideological realm. Such an observation corresponds closely to Franklin
Fearing's (1947) old but still relevant conclusion that the two main
generalizations about the "effects" of movie content that seem justified
are:
"Any film ... has some measurable effects on specific
attitudes of those exposed to it, provided a measuring
instrument (e.g. attitude scale) is devised for it, and provided
the audience is sufficiently interested to give it sustained
attention."
"Films ... assist the individual in structuring his (sic) world."
The sustained attention to which Fearing refers is created in film by the
phenomenon of "identification." Given this concentrated involvement
and the transparency of the various filmic techniques employed, we are
unaware or unconscious of the many things which are happening to us
as we watch. In addition, since four-fifths of all films are closed
narratives (Linton and Jowett, 1976), the vast majority of films are self-
contained experiences. This means that the immediate, conscious and
behavioral effects of films are much less prominent than the longterm,
unconscious attitudinal ones. The former would seem to be important
only in cases of overidentification and for those who have difficulty in
differentiating fantasy from reality.
But what are the "effects" of films on the rest of us normal people? Let
us take the example of THE EXORCIST, referred to earlier in connection
with the appeal of frightening, or otherwise disturbing movies. After
much cursing and swearing, shaking of beds and levitation, much
horrific self-mutilations and killings, the devil is finally defeated.
"Things are back to normal and we get the strong impression that Chris
and her daughter, like Karras, are saved" (McCormick, 1974).
McCormick explains the overall effect of THE EXORCIST as follows:
What THE EXORCIST does to people is to turn them to a
mystical, authoritarian solution to problems that seem to
have dropped out of the sky. The irrationality of everyday life
becomes rationalized by the more extreme irrationality of the
occult. The status quo, it tries to tell us, is good, and
momentary disruptions of it are what cause our suffering,
but if we just sit tight and pray, help will arrive, and time-
honored values will be restored."
More generally, popular U.S. films operate as "dramas of reassurance."
The beliefs, attitudes and values presented in Hollywood films tend to
resonate with the dominant beliefs, attitudes and values of American
society. In other words, the dominant ideology of a society tends to be
reinforced by the ideology presented in its films. £6] This assertion
would seem to be in line with the findings of mass communications
research, which indicate that its most powerful effects are in the area of
reinforcement. £7] (Klapper, i960; Halloran, 1964). These results are
quite possibly due in large part to the widespread acceptance of the
notion of film's (and more generally the media's) non-ideological
character, which tends to deflect attention from, and make viewers less
resistant to the latent messages of the films. It is little wonder, then, that
Brazilian Cinema Novo filmmaker Glauber Rocha (1970), has been
moved to describe Hollywood's allegedly non-ideological films as both
the most political and "the most politically effectual" cinema.
The existence and strength of this film-as-entertainment ideology
creates a dilemma for radical filmmakers. This dilemma involves the
relationship between the film and its audience, which James Monaco
(1976) describes as providing the "one single quality that separates
'political' from 'nonpolitical' film." A number of writers have discussed
the nature of this dilemma and the method of dealing with it, centering
their arguments around Costa-Gavras' work (Hennebelle, 1974;
Kalishman, 1974; Monaco, 1976). Simplifying matters somewhat, one
can describe the issue as the relative emphasis given to "political"
subject matter ("content") or "political" presentation ("form"). Roughly
the argument runs as follows. If one wishes to make political appeals to
a large audience, one must not break too much with the aesthetic
traditions with which large numbers of people are comfortable. At the
same time, however, one must remember that forms are not completely
innocent or neutral (especially the traditional, popular ones) and can
subvert or pervert the intended political content of films.
Monaco (1976) attempts to clarity the dilemma and "to begin to
construct a theory of politics and film ... by study[ing] closely the
connection between a film and the people who see it." Such an attempt
involves a consideration of the audiences' pre-existing ideologies and
the ways in which the filmmakers can penetrate them. Monaco's answer
is a combination of Shavian sugarcoating to attract an audience and (it
would seem a mild) Brechtian distanciation to involve the audience
intellectually. While such an approach seems appealing and plausible,
on reflection it appears less realistic given the unproblematic approach
Monaco takes to the nature of the film-viewing experience and the
ideology that surrounds it.
Metz (1975) contends, for example, that the political uses of the cinema
are much more limited than those of the theater since in the cinema
both the represented (i.e. the events, characters, etc.) and the
representation (i.e. the film itself) are imaginary. As a result, "Attempts
to 'defictionalise' the spectacle, notably since Brecht, have gone further
in the theatre than in the cinema, and not by chance." In addition, we
have pointed out how widespread and influential the film-as-
entertainment ideology is. And an important element of this ideology is
the understanding that a film is "a show to be exhibited in large theaters
with a standard duration, [consisting of] hermetic structures that are
born and die on the screen ..." (Solanos and Getino, 1970). The latter
characteristic is particularly pertinent given the importance that
Monaco places on the filmmaker's leaving "the audience to its own
devices with these new materials" [which the filmmaker has generated].
The result is that the main work takes place not during the film (or play)
but after it, as the audience begins to work out the dialectic. But the
film-as-entertainment ideology considers films as self-contained entities
not deserving of serious deliberation. Such an approach precludes
viewers from dealing with the film (on a conscious level at least) after
they leave the theater. The film-as-entertainment ideology, then,
protects the dominant ideology from serious examination while at the
same time reinforcing its basic tenets. Further serious study of the film¬
viewing experience, and the entertainment ideology that surrounds it,
must be added to Monaco's (1976) consideration of the relationship
between the work and the audience before filmmakers can either realize
the "socially conscious entertainment film" (Brom, 1974; Corr and
Gessner, 1974), or pronounce it a basic contradiction in terms.
Notes
1. Plamenatz (1970) actually restricts ideology to the levels of ideas or
beliefs and of attitudes. Given the importance of values and their often
inextricable connection to beliefs and attitudes, I have included them in
the present formulation.
2u In addition, Gans notes that being entertained also means that
viewers "want to be surprised with something new or different." Given
that much of what passes for innovation in films is little more than slight
variations in surface structure (especially in the case of film cycles), I
have chosen to ignore this portion of Gans' definition.
3, Metz (1975) posits that the spectator's psychology ("the desire to go to
the cinema") is
"a kind of reflection shaped by the film industry, but it is also
a real link in the chain of the overall mechanism of that
industry. It occupies one of the essential positions in the
circulation of money, the turnover of capital without which
films could no longer be made ..."
Given this position and the fact that spectators are not physically
coerced into attending, "the [cinema] institution as a whole has filmic
pleasure alone as its aim."
4* Lucas (1968) notes that in Aristotle's formulation,
"Katharsis, though affording a pleasurable relief, seems to be
the consequence and justification of tragic pleasure rather
than the pleasure itself. But it is implied that the pleasure is
hard to take, which is the reason why happy endings are
often supplied; they are a concession to the weakness of the
audience."
5. Metz characterizes identification with the camera and with oneself "as
a pure act of perception" (i.e. with one's own look) as primary cinematic
identification proper, the others together constituting secondary
cinematic identification.
(L One should also remember that the U.S. motion picture industry
dominates the international film market. Guback (1974) estimates,
"Upwards of 30 million people around the world see the
average American film during its period of release outside
socialist countries."
Furthermore, the increased emphasis on the international marketing of
films combined with "the great weight of the U.S. market and the U.S.
film industry tends to give the increasing homogenized product a
cultural bias" (Phillips, 1975). A similar domination of the production
and distribution structure exists in the international television market
(Guback, 1974), but this "global traffic in television" is perhaps even
more culturally insidious since
"most programs in international circulation were originally
made to satisfy the tastes of audiences in the countries where
they were produced and first marketed" (Vans, 1974).
The ideological impact of this cultural bias is exemplified by Trach's
(1975) finding that Canadians' beliefs about their own legal system are
largely the result of their exposure to U.S. lawyer series. Even in some
Third World countries, such as Colombia, "The amusement role of TV
[and one would assume of film as well] is considered ideologically
neutral" (de Cordona, 1975). The State allows such material to remain in
the private domain, exerting de facto political control over only
obviously political issues. In other less blatantly ideological areas, the
programers are "subject to the power of the [foreign-controlled]
advertising agencies and their clients" (de Cordona, 1975).
7. Mass communications are also powerful in those areas in which there
are not already strong preexistent beliefs, attitudes and values. This
makes them increasingly powerful in the modern world since our
knowledge of that world has expanded, but more as a result of indirect
rather than direct experience. Similarly, this phenomena could account
for the power of U.S. film and television material in foreign cultures
(especially ones very different from U.S. society) since the experience
presented would be very remote from the experiences of the foreign
viewers. This would be more markedly so if the viewers accepted the
films and television programs "simply as entertainment."
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Brom, Tom. "Towards the Socially Conscious Entertainment Film: An
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Clark, Cedric. "Race, Identification, and Television Violence," in G.A.
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Dart, Peter. "The Concept of 'Identification' in Film Theory." Paper
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Feilitzen, Cecilia V. and Olga Linne, "Identifying with Televison
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To top Current issue Archived essays Jump Cut home
JUMP CUT
A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY MEDIA
Ideology, determinism and
relative autonomy
by Michael Rosenthal
from Jump Cut, no. 17, April 1978, pp. 19-22
copyright Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, 1978, 2005
One of the key problems confronting Marxist film theory, as well as
Marxist aesthetics in general, is the status of ideology as a determined
product of social, and specifically economic, relations. It is a
fundamental and unavoidable premise of any Marxist enquiry that
ideology — the "consciousness" of people in society and the material
cultural products in which this consciousness is embedded — is, in fact,
determined.
"The sum total of these relations of production constitutes
the economic structure of society, the real foundation on
which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which
corresponds definite forms of social consciousness ... It is not
the consciousness of men [sic] that determines their being
but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their
consciousness."[l]
"The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling
ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of
society is, at the same time its ruling intellectual force ... The
ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of
the dominant material relationships, the dominant material
relationships grasped as ideas ..."[2]
Such premises are basic to the materialist conception of history as a
whole. They are instrumental in distinguishing materialism from
idealism, thereby making the radical critique of ideology possible.
These assumptions, however, also give rise to a major danger when we
attempt to apply Marxist theory to particular films — a danger which is
commonly, if vaguely, referred to as "vulgar determinism." The term is
hard to define sharply because there are few proponents of vulgar
determinism per se who will enter a debate on its behalf. Basically, it
involves the assumption that the ideological superstructure is totally
passive, merely reflecting processes that are going on elsewhere in the
economic base. Thus, one might describe ROCKY as a "bourgeois" effort
to baffle and confound the working class, deluding the audience with
false hope and distracting it from its revolutionary tasks. Or one might
describe a Godard film as "petit-bourgeois" due to the class background
of its creator. The shortcomings of such as approach are evident:
1. It reduces the film to a single meaning, as a one-to-one political
allegory, thereby impoverishing it.
2 . To the extent that it is true, it applies so broadly as to be useless —
if all Hollywood films are merely "bourgeois," we cannot
distinguish between them or explore them in any useful way.
3 . It fails to account for empirically perceived limits to the ruling
class' use of the ideological apparatus, for example, the absence of
films glorifying the bicentennial, or the very few glorifying
America's role in Vietnam.
4 . It leads to a political quietism; if film practice is merely the passive
reflection of something else, there is no point trying to accomplish
anything within it.
Admittedly, there are very few examples of this sort of writing in JUMP
CUT and other radical film journals. Nevertheless, the specter of vulgar
determinism is always present as a danger and a threat, something we
react against, and attempt to avoid at all costs. Among those costs, I feel,
has been the substitution of a vaguely "radical" film theory for a
properly Marxist film theory, an inability to situate given films within
the analysis of classes and class struggle developed by Marx. The
problem is determining how to avoid the traps of "vulgar determinism"
without sidetracking determinism, and hence materialism, altogether.
Must an understanding of ideology as determined by "social being" lead
to a mechanistic reduction of film texts?
This problem, in its general form, has long been a central topic of debate
among Marxists. Engels wrote numerous letters after the death of Marx
protesting, with increasing urgency, the economic reductionism taking
hold in the Marxist movement. [3] Recently, French Communist Party
theorist Louis Althusser has attempted an important reformulation of
the terms of the problem. [4] Drawing from Engel's letters, Althusser
argues that the various superstructures (law, politics, ideology) are
characterized by a "relative autonomy" from the base. These structures
take concrete form in material apparatuses (such as the judicial
apparatus or the state apparatus), which have their own specific unity
and coherence. Each plays a part in determining social events, although
the economic structures remain "determinant in the last instance."
These formulations while providing more sophisticated methodological
tools, do not in any way "solve" the problem. It is too easy, when writing
about film, to simply re-inscribe the old terms of the problem into the
new phraseology, to conceive of relative autonomy as a kind of escape
from the rigors of economic determinism, an escape which is always,
inexplicably, foiled in the "last instance." Thus, although we can
describe films like GODFATHER II or CHINATOWN as "critiques of
capitalism" because of their relative autonomy, they remain determined
by capitalist economic relations, in the "last instance." The character of
that determination, piled onto the last instance, remains a mystery.
Furthermore, we often present it as some kind of antithesis of relative
autonomy, as if it were a version of the antithesis of "freedom" and
"necessity."
In consequence, our understanding of economic determination (which
is a condition for an understanding of autonomy) remains in essence the
same as in "vulgar determinism," while relative autonomy becomes a
sort of ongoing exception. That is, we continue to see the economic base
as mission control, which beams out commands to passive agents in the
superstructures. With our magic protective shield of relative autonomy,
we are safe from these commands until they catch up with us in the
dreaded last instance. And, as Althusser somewhat cryptically assures
us, "the lonely hour of the last instance never arrives." £5]
It is my impression, judging from my own difficulties and what I can
surmise in the work of others, that a certain embarrassment around the
concept of determination presents a continual frustration in all areas of
Marxist film theory, including reviews of current films. We simply do
not know how to insert our political understanding of the social
environment, or our data about the economics of the film industry, into
a discussion of a particular film without becoming mechanistic. Further,
this has led to an evasion of the theoretically sticky areas of political film
theory, with a consequent over-emphasis on questions of ideology and
form, which critics can speculate about without the need for outside
social reference.
The lack in film theory of an adequate concept of determinism and
autonomy has been a major factor in this impasse. To help develop such
a concept, I propose a "detour" into another area of Marxist study,
whose theorists have paid a good deal of careful and rigorous attention
to the question of relative autonomy — the Marxist theory of the
capitalist state.
THE DETOUR
In the absence of any strong tradition of its own, recent Marxist film
theory has tended to advance through detours into the methodologies,
and often the terminologies, of disciplines related to other subjects of
study. In the past several years, linguistics and the language-oriented
science of semiology have been a dominant influence. While these
methods have helped us to decode and identify ideological messages in
films, they have serious shortcomings in terms of our overall
understanding of ideology per se. As Geoffrey Nowell-Smith pointed out
in a recent JUMP CUT, linguistics concerns itself with the exchange of
sign and meaning (in communication and understanding) and not with
the production of signs (as in a Hollywood studio). £6] It therefore skirts
the issue of political economy, and social class relations.
If we do not recognize the limitations of the linguistic model and
attempt to extend the analogy overenthusiastically, that is, if we attempt
to analyze ideology as a language, the limits of the linguistic model
impose themselves in a way that limits our understanding of ideology as
well. As a model of successful, completed communication, linguistics
can hinder our exploration of the mechanisms of misrepresentation
(intentional or otherwise) and misunderstanding that characterize
ideological processes. Moreover, it becomes easy to misconceive
ideology as a unitary, monolithic system, a great social equalizer that
penetrates all "consciousness" in the same way. This can lead to an
incorrect notion of "bourgeois ideology" as a solid, consistent bloc of
ideas, spoon-fed to a passive population. The point here is not to attack
semiology, but to stress the repercussions of ignoring the limitations of
our analogies.
In particular, semiology can do little to illuminate the problem of
determinism and relative autonomy, which it therefore tends to obscure
from view. I feel that we can usefully approach this problem if we step
outside of the "liberal arts," and explore the work that has been done
analyzing the relative autonomy of other levels in society — particularly
in Marxist state theory. Such a study cannot, of course, lead to an
adequate general account of ideology, but in certain respects the points
of analogy are compelling. We should recall that Marx considered
political forms to be a level of the superstructure (he usually mentioned
them first, throwing in culture as an afterthought) and therefore, to be
determined by economic relationships. The same danger exists, as with
film, of the mechanistic approach, of viewing the state as simply a
passive tool of the ruling class (or dominant faction within the ruling
class). This approach, called instrumentalism, is the basis of a lot of the
work which undertakes to prove that state functionaries are in fact
members of the ruling class (as if this told us anything about how the
state operates) as well as to prove strange conspiracies and the like.
On the other hand, there is also the need to combat, while avoiding
these errors, the bourgeois idealist notion of the state as neutral arbiter
of social conflict, standing above the particular interests and expressing
the "general interest." Hence Marxist state theorists must account for
the many possible forms of the capitalist state (from liberal democracy
to fascism) and for the many, often contradictory actions taken by the
same state, while at the same time demonstrating how, in all of these
forms, the state remains essentially capitalist. They must specify the
character and limits of the relative autonomy of the state, as a guide to
political action. jjzl
Work on this problem has developed far more thoroughly and rigorously
than it has in the area of ideology. The major thinkers of the Marxist
tradition have addressed a good deal of their attention to the problems
of politics, for the simple reason that most of them were political
activists and not cultural activists. State power represents both the
immediate goal and immediate enemy of practical revolutionary activity.
Understanding the mechanisms of the state is a condition for
formulating effective tactics and strategy. We should recall (to our
sorrow) that the recent, feverish attention lavished on ideology is
probably a result of the historical separation of Marxist theory from
working class politics. £8] Furthermore, the consequences of theoretical
errors are more immediately apparent in the area of politics. For
example, the mistaken theoretical line of the Communist International,
in the period 1928-35, which held that fascism was the last desperate
gasp of a dying capitalism, produced disastrous political consequences
as Communist parties, "assured" of their imminent victory, refused to
co-operate with any other anti-fascist forces.
In this essay I will survey some of the analyses developed by Nicos
Poulantzas, a Greek Marxist writing in French, [gj This does not mean
that Poulantzas' work is synonomous with Marxist state theory — it is
one position in a many-sided controversy. What follows should be
considered as an entry into the discussion, not as a conclusive
statement. I am only selecting from his work those points that concern
the questions I am posing.
SYNOPSIS
Poulantzas begins his analysis by attempting to situate the concept of
politics and the state within the overall concept of mode of production.
This concept, one of Marx's greatest contribution to the analysis of
human social formations, denotes a specific unity of the forces of
production (factories, labor, technologies, etc.) and the social relations
into which people enter in order to carry out productive activity. In
societies divided into classes, these social relations are always
antagonistic. In this sense, mode of production designates the specific
form in which one class is exploited by another, the manner in which the
surplus labor of one class accrues to the benefit of the other.
In the feudal mode of production, the basic social relations are between
the landlord class, and a class of peasants who own their own tools, but
must devote part of their labor to the landlord's crop. In the capitalist
mode of production, the "tools," such as factories or IBM machines, are
not owned by the workers, who have nothing to bring to the production
process but their ability to work, which they sell for wages. Capital,
therefore, is not a thing (like a certain amount of money), but a social
relationship. A factory only becomes "capital" when there is a capitalist
class and a working class, just as a black person only becomes a slave
within certain social relationships. A mode of production therefore is an
ensemble of social relations in which material values are produced, and
the dominant social relations themselves are unceasingly reproduced.
It is important to distinguish "mode of production," which is an
abstract, analytical category, from a concrete, historical social formation
(such as the U.S. in the 70s), in which several modes of production, and
several phases of the development of a mode of production overlap, with
one always dominant. There are still a number of craftspeople who own
their own tools, but the commodities they produce enter the market
system of monopoly capital, which therefore does not determine
everything, but does dominate everything. In order to understand any
social formation, it is necessary to understand the basic social relations
given by the concept of mode of production.
Most of the relations I have used as examples have been economic,
relations of exploitation. Poulantzas, following Althusser, points out that
the mode of production is constituted, not only by economic social
relations, but by political and ideological (and other) relations as well.
He refers to these as regions of the mode of production (the spatial
metaphor is always cumbersome, but perhaps unavoidable). Each of
these regions has its own characteristic structure.
He then distinguishes between political, economic and ideological
structures in terms of the social relations, and social activities, or
practices, which these structures organize. (Remember that these
activities are always contradictory and antagonistic in keeping with the
basic class character of capitalist society.) The object of economic
activity is production in the strict sense; that of ideological activity is
representation — what Althusser calls our imaginary relation to our real
conditions of existence. Political activity has as its object the material
alteration (or stabilization) of prevailing social practices and
relationships.
This broad definition includes fundamental transformations, as in the
case of revolutionary political activity. But it also, and more frequently,
covers the adjustments in social practice that have to be made in order
for capitalism to deal with new and changing problems, without at the
same time challenging the basic relations of domination. For example,
when the energy monopolies are faced with new economic
contradictions, the consequent adjustments in social practice are
worked out through legislatures, regulatory agencies, and other parts of
the political apparatus. The point here is not to distinguish between
some activities which are, and others which are not, political; but rather
to analyze activities in terms of their political ramifications. In this
sense, the contradictions that structure the political region are between
practices that aim at maintaining the prevailing relations, and those that
aim at transforming them.
The state is a political apparatus whose function is to ensure the
reproduction of the system as a whole. If we refer back to the basic
political contradiction (maintenance/transformation), it is clear that the
state is entirely on the side of maintenance, and therefore serves the
interest of the dominant class. Instrumentalist theory would agree with
this assessment, and claim that the state is therefore a tool, entirely
responsive to the will of the ruling class, which they can use to bludgeon
down social contradictions. Poulantzas draws a different conclusion. He
describes the state as the factor of unity and cohesion in society: the
apparatus which keeps it from flying apart under the pressure of its
intrinsic contradictions. Its role is to regulate these contradictions in
order to maintain the unstable equilibrium of the system (unstable
because based on contradiction, equilibrium because the system of
exploitation does in fact manage to reproduce itself, along with its
constituent contradictions, from day to day and generation to
generation).
It cannot perform this role as a tool, lined up squarely on one side of
social contradictions. In order to regulate the contradictions that must
necessarily exist in a class society, the state must include and contain
them, so that these contradictions are condensed within it. As Marx put
it, the state is the official resume of society, a resume, that is, not only of
the elements of society, but also of their contradictory social relations
(class struggles for short). _[io]
A key feature of this approach is that it sees the state not as an object, a
static thing, but as a social relation, just as Marx insisted that capital is
not a thing, but a social relation. Similarly the state, while maintaining
(and in order to maintain) dominant class relationships is also in
Poulantzas words, "shot through and constituted with and by class
contradictions." fill
Poulantzas discusses the example of European social democracy and
reformism. Radicals often treat reformism as a "co-optation" of
revolutionary demands, and while this is in some sense true, it is
incorrect to think of it as a devious bourgeois scheme, elaborated out of
thin air to confuse the masses. The bourgeoisie would not, "by
themselves," have elaborated reformism. The very notion is absurd
because the bourgeoisie are never by themselves; they exist as a class
only in relation to other classes. Rather, reformism is an effect of
working class struggle on the political region, within the context of that
class's fundamental political subjugation.
Social security, unemployment insurance and, by extension, the whole
welfare apparatus are examples in recent U.S. history. These are
administered in such a manner as to reproduce relations of subjugation
and exploitation. Recipients are systematically humiliated, their lives
are regimented by endless petty rules, they can be injected into the labor
market and yanked back out of it by slight changes in the regulations,
they are held up as a threat to the rest of the workforce, etc. However, if
we forget that these systems came into being only after long and
arduous struggles by the working class, we slip into something similar to
the conventional myth of Roosevelt as a magnanimous sugar-daddy who
"gave" the people social security out of the goodness of his heart.
RELATIVE AUTONOMY AND THE TOTALIZING INSTANCE
We can see from this example some of the important principles of the
relative autonomy of the state. As the cohesive, regulating factor of the
social formation it must make allowances (within strict limits) for the
class interests of the dominated as well as the dominant classes. It is not
a question of "concessions" made by the state (for this would imply that
the state is a unified and conscious entity capable of entering
negotiations) but rather of concessions and compromises within the
state. Since its role is to reproduce (maintain) a complex unity based on
contradiction, it cannot be a monolithic, fissureless bloc, but is itself, by
virtue of its very structure, divided. The state is not a tool in the class
struggle, but an arena which is controlled and "fixed" by the bourgeoisie,
but in which, nonetheless, a real struggle goes on.
It is therefore incorrect to pose the idea of relative autonomy as if it were
somewhere intermediate on a spectrum between total determination by
the economy or ruling class interests, and total freedom from these
determinations. Relative autonomy is not an "escape" from
determinism, tied down only by the "last instance;" it is the specific form
through which determinism is exercised.
Similarly, it is incorrect to attempt to construct a general mode of
relative autonomy; to pose such questions as "how relative is relative
autonomy." For relative autonomy is not an idea, but the result of a
material set of social practices. The concrete form taken by this
autonomy depends on the conjuncture of class struggle at any given
time. Liberal democracies and fascist dictatorships are both political
forms of capitalist domination, but they clearly have very different
degrees of autonomy inscribed in their structures.
This theory emerges, in part, as a sustained critique of what Poulantzas
calls "the totalizing instance" (and what Althusser calls "expressive
totality"). This is the idea that a single aspect of a totality can be the
origin and reference point of the totality and everything within it. (I am
expressing it in this general form because the "totality" in question may
be the whole of a social formation, or its ideology, or it may be a single
film.)
The classic examples of this style of thought are in Hegel, who saw the
Roman period as "the age of Law," the Middle Ages as "the age of
religion," etc. That is, everything done or said in the Roman period was
simply a reflection of the animated principle Law, so that Law
"totalized" all of Roman society.
The same kind of reasoning is involved in mechanistic determinism. In
this case, the economically dominant class becomes the "totalizing
instance:" all art is bourgeois art, all science is bourgeois science, all in
all it is a bourgeois society.
The crucial point is that Marx based his materialism on social relations
of contradiction and struggle, while "totalizing" tends to eliminate these
from the analysis. For example, it would not be correct to consider the
antebellum South as a "slave-owners' society." One might employ this
term with the best of political intentions; but it implicitly denies that the
culture, the work, and the struggles of the slaves (on a day-to-day basis
as well as in mass insurrections) were an essential, constituent part of
the whole society. It is more correct to call it a "slave-owning society,"
structured by the contradictory social relations between slave-owners
and slaves. Similarly, we do not live in a "bourgeois society;" but in a
society in which the capitalist mode of production is dominant, and in
which the bourgeoisie is therefore the dominant class. This is not always
the most convenient thing to say, but it is useful to keep in mind when
we are attempting to analyze social (including filmmaking) practices.
SO WHAT?
What is the bearing of this material on our study of ideology in films? It
struck me, when reading Poulantzas, that his discussion of state power
touched on problems that had most baffled me when I tried to write
about films — in part because his description of the state, as a "factor of
cohesion in a social formation," would seem to apply, without much
stretching, to ideology as well. Nevertheless, as I cautioned earlier, we
have to watch out for overstepping the limits of an analogy. We cannot
project a description of the state directly onto the problem of ideology,
without distorting or denying) the particular unity and cohesion of
ideological structures, f 12I Ideology and politics do not operate in the
same way, and we need a clearer sense of the distinction between them,
based (for example) on the specific character of representation, and on
the specifically commercial nature of much of the ideological apparatus
— the relation of Gulf and Western to a ticket buyer is different from
that of a state agency to a citizen.
What ideology does share in common with politics (and this was the
point of my analogy) is that each is characterized both by class
domination and by relative autonomy. Thus, while the study of state
power cannot generate an adequate general description of ideology, it
can help us to formulate some of our questions about ideology.
It suggests to me, for instance, that we should not conceive ideology as a
thing, as a completed and coherent system of ideas which the
bourgeoisie utilizes to brainwash the rest of society. Rather, we should
approach ideological processes as social relationships, "shot through
with and constituted by" class contradictions. The concept of ideological
domination implies ideological struggle; it does not imply the complete
elimination of social contradiction from the sphere of discourse. This is
in part what distinguishes ideology from propaganda. Ideological
domination does not exclude social struggle, it includes social struggle.
If successful, it subsumes various, contradictory discourses within a
relatively coherent (but always unstable) discourse of domination.
Poulantzas puts it as follows:
"The structure of the dominant ideology cannot be
deciphered from its relations with a 'class consciousness'
considered in a vacuum, but from the starting point of the
field of class struggle, i.e., from the concrete relation between
the various classes in struggle, the relations within which
class domination functions. Hence we can understand not
only why the dominated classes necessarily experience their
conditions of existence within the discourse of the dominant
ideology, but also why that discourse presents elements
borrowed from ways of life other than that of the dominant
class." fml
In order to develop these ideas rigorously, we would need a general
theory of ideology, including a workable definition of ideological class
practices. I do not pretend to have such a theory in my pocket, and do
not have the space here to discuss the problems involved. This absence
imparts an unavoidable vagueness to the discussion, a vagueness that I
feel is implicit, if unstated, in most of what appears in JUMP CUT.
Given this limitation, I would like to suggest a number of possible lines
of enquiry, and areas for future work, prompted by my reading of state
theory.
The first concerns our discussion of individual films, particularly films
in current release. This is an important area of work, because it is
through movie reviews that Marxist film theory most often comes in
contact with a wider readership. Yet movie reviews lose their impact
under the weight of fruitless debates over whether a given film is
"bourgeois" or "progressive" — attempts to totalize the film on the side
of one or another team.
Marxist film critics have long been aware of the extreme complexity of
the ideological inflection of mass films; but I feel we have lacked a
theoretical framework adequate to generate new knowledge about these
problems. When we see films, such as ROCKY or WHITE LINE FEVER,
which present certain working class experiences and resentments in a
genuine form, yet which work towards complacent or reactionary
resolutions, we are unsure on which side of the grand political scale to
assign them. We find it difficult to praise the commodities of the
monopoly capitalists who own Hollywood, but we are unwilling
(properly) to trash every Hollywood film that comes down the pike, a
strategy which would consign our criticism to sectarian irrelevance.
Often we simply tack on to favorable reviews a standardized note that
the film "stops short" of dealing with the real causes.
If we view these contradictions as characteristic instances of relative
autonomy as it operates in the field of ideology, we may come closer to
an understanding of ideological practices in film. The film is a
"determined" product of society because the class contradictions, which
determine the whole structure of society, operate as well within the
ideological structures. It is further determined in the sense that the
dominant ideological discourse in society is generally dominant in the
Hollywood film. Yet this domination is not exercised directly as a simple
tool of mind control, as "bourgeois propaganda." There are virtually no
films which directly sing the praises of the Du Ponts and the
Rockefellers. In order to be effective in maintaining bourgeois
hegemony in the long-run, the structures of the apparatus must permit
the overriding of short-run ruling class interests by giving expression to
what Poulantzas calls "elements borrowed from ways of life" of the
dominated classes. These are not wholly absorbed into a "bourgeois
world view," but retain an integrity as one of the aspects of a
contradictory and conflicting unity.
It might be possible, then, to view an individual film, as well as the
ideological apparatuses as a whole, as a site of ideological class struggle.
This does not mean that the outcome, within a given film, is ever in
doubt, that the proletariat might suddenly and unexpectedly emerge
victorious. It might mean that within the action of the film, the relations
of ideological domination are worked out, as potentially subversive
material is articulated within the dominant discourse. The film must
actually perform the work of making the various contradictory elements
cohere in an unstable equilibrium. This would imply that a film is not a
homogenous totality with a single ideological "message," but rather
presents a conflicting unity.
This is the case even with such overtly propagandistic products as cold-
war anti-Communist films like RED NIGHTMARE or I MARRIED A
COMMUNIST. These films did not attempt to depict even a distorted
image of Communist ideology; their Communists are presented simply
as gangsters. What they do depict, and very clearly, are the changes
brought about in society by the development of monopoly capitalism
(increased conformity of consumption, destruction of family ties, etc.),
articulated in the form of the dominant anti-Communism. The most
self-consciously progressive films made in the same period (e.g., HOME
OF THE-BRAVE) attempted to focus on social injustices in such a way
as to emphasize the fundamental soundness and perfectibility of the
dominant social relations. In each case, the key principle is one of
ideological relationship rather than ideological "message." Clearly the
terms of this relationship have to be more rigorously worked out; but we
must be able to pose these questions before we can begin answering
them.
A materialist understanding of relative autonomy can also help us to
formulate the kinds of questions we pose when studying the material
apparatuses of the film industry. Too often we merely allude to the self-
evident fact that Hollywood film studios are owned by the bourgeoisie
and run for profit, and we leave it at that. This would be enough to
account for the prevalence of "bourgeois ideology;" but if we accept the
idea that the industry allows within its structures for a certain
ideological latitude, it is necessary to develop a far more rigorous
analysis of the structures of the industry, to determine the range and
limits of that latitude. All of the large media industries are out for a
buck, yet each differs in its characteristic structures and forms of
autonomy. For example, it seems to me that television is on a much
tighter leash, in terms of autonomy, than is film, which is itself on a
tighter leash than the print media. (Consider the excision made in a
single work as it passes from print to screen to tube.) If we ask why this
should be the case, we must consider what the differences are, in these
apparatuses, which permit differing levels of autonomy.
Part of the answer to this particular problem is that each of these media
has a different capital entry threshhold. You can produce a book and
distribute it nationally for a few thousand dollars, while the production
and national exposure of a television show requires access to millions.
But this is only a first step toward the answer, and immediately suggests
new problems, such as the differing content of "distribution" when
applied to books and TV and films.
What mode and level of control does a distributor exercise, as opposed
to an exhibitor, a scriptwriter, or a major shareholder in Gulf and
Western? Under what conditions are constraints exercised directly (as
when a studio shelves or reshoots part of a film) and how are indirect
constraints structured into the "free play" of the system? What (if any)
has been the effect on ideological practices of the absorption of the
majors into multinational corporations — and if there has been no
effect, why not? What is the role of the audience in determining the
presence and extent of non-dominant ideologies within films? Marxist
film theory should be able to deal with these questions in concrete and
specific terms. To do this, we must attempt to analyze the film
commodity with the same care and rigor that Marx devoted to his
analysis of commodities in general. Such an analysis must certainly
involve a clear formulation of the separate moments of production,
distribution and exhibition, and an understanding of the social relations
that structure each of these processes, as well as their interaction in the
overall reproduction process of the film industry. While I feel that a
good deal of raw data has been dug up on these issues, the theoretical
terrain on which we can position this data has been lacking. A clearer
understanding of relative autonomy can help to establish this terrain.
This exposition runs counter to a concept of autonomy which underlies
much recent Marxist film theory (although it is rarely directly spelled
out in these terms): the notion of autonomy as a kind of escape from the
grim and perplexing laws of determination. In this view, the
overwhelming majority of films are totally determined by "bourgeois
ideology," "bourgeois form," "bourgeois relations to the spectator." The
privileged terrain of "autonomy" is reserved for a few, exceptional films,
which carry off mini-revolutions by transforming the "mode of
production" of film (its formal signifying techniques) in purely filmic
terms.
I have no desire to challenge the potential value of research into the
ideological implications of cinematic form. But it does not help to base
this research on ad hoc theories which use Marxist categories in a purely
metaphorical sense. Such is the case, for example, when the term
"bourgeois" is detached from all socio-political frames of reference, and
used to refer to whatever is typical and conventional. Consequently,
whatever challenges the typical and conventional becomes
"revolutionary" in the fullest allowable sense. Eventually, this leads to
such notions as Godard having a "non-bourgeois" f 14I camera style, or
Straub carrying out "significant political activity on the level of theory."
[15]
The same logic can equally well support the claim of a "revolutionary
new laundry product," which carries out a transformation in the
autonomous "detergent" region. Or it can support the production of a
"revolutionary chair," which, by means of a properly glued-on tack, calls
into question the bourgeois, consumerist attitude of the sitter toward
the chair.
The central problem of Marxist film theory is to correctly situate film
within the class struggle, not to find an analogy in film for the class
struggle. The isolation and ineffectiveness of formally innovative film
raise questions which must be confronted head-on, and not transformed
into a virtue. Otherwise, we return to the idealist vision of the artist as
"unacknowledged legislator of mankind (sic)," once a revolutionary in
the private region of his/her soul, now a revolutionary in the private
region of his/her theory.
The relative autonomy of ideology does not mean that it can follow a
purely independent form of theoretical development; nor does it provide
a mode of escape from class domination. Rather, it is a mode of class
domination, a necessary and integral characteristic of the ideological
apparatus under capitalism. We can understand and analyze A STAR IS
BORN as an instance of relative autonomy as clearly as we can a film by
Godard or Straub-Huillet. And we could add (for the sake of argument)
that the Straub-Huillet film is a determined instance of the relations of
domination because it reproduces an ideological cleavage within film
audiences, fostering open contempt for the "laziness" of the mass
audience.
It is interesting to note that much of the formalist tendency in theory
winds up using the method of the totalizing instance — the theoretical
opposite pole of relative autonomy. Thus the use of "illusionism," of
certain narrative conventions, even of optically ground lenses can be
sufficient, in and of itself, to totalize a film as a "bourgeois" product. And
so we return to a situation which was initially seen as the fatal snare of
"vulgar determinism" — a theory so broadly general that it can detect no
significant political distinction between SALT OF THE EARTH and
GONE WITH THE WIND.
The Marxist study of film has been going in circles between concepts of
"revolutionary form" (which bars the dominant practice of film — the
commercial feature — from consideration) and nebulous concepts like
"false consciousness" (which oblige us to play at being mindreaders of
the working class.) I have tried to indicate a theoretical terrain in which
discussion can occur in a manner that will help us formulate what we
already know, as well as produce new knowledge. I hope this discussion
will bring us closer to the fundamental political questions which must
underscore all Marxist theoretical work, work which aims to guide
practical action.
Notes
n Karl Marx, "Preface to The Critique of Political Economy," in Marx &
Engels, Selected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1974) p.
182.
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology (New York:
International Publishers, 1970) p. 64.
3* In particular, see the letter to Joseph Bloch (Sept. 21,1890) in Karl
Marx and Frederick Engels, On Literature and Art (Moscow: Progress
Publishers, 1976) pp. 57-62.
4^ Louis Althusser, "Contradiction and Overdetermination," in For Marx
(New York: Random House, 1969), pp. 87-128.
5 * Ibid., p. 113.
(L Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, "Moving On from Metz," Jump Cut 12-13, P-
41 .
Zl For a good general survey of work in the field see David A. Gold et. al.,
"Recent Developments in Marxist Theories of the State," Monthly
Review 27:5, pp. 29-43, #6, pp. 36-51*
8^ This phenomenon and its theoretical consequences are discussed at
length in Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism
(London: New Left Books, 1976) p. 29 et. pass.
Available in English translation are two theoretical volumes, Political
Power and Social Classes (London: New Left Books, 1973) and Classes
in Contemporary Capitalism (London: New Left Books, 1975); and two
volumes of concrete political-historical analysis, Fascism and
Dictatorship (London: New Left Books, 1974) and The Crisis of the
Dictatorships (London: New Left Books, 1976). Unfortunately, these
books are all inordinately expensive, and their style is often less than
fluid.
10. Karl Marx, letter to P.V. Annekov (Dec. 28,1846) in Karl Marx, The
Poverty of Philosophy (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1955), p. 156.
11. Nicos Poulantzas, "The Capitalist State," New Left Review, No. 95
(Jan.-Feb. 1976) p. 75.
12. Louis Althusser falls prey to this error in his essay "Ideology and
Ideological State Apparatuses," in Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy
(New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971) pp. 127-186.
13. Political Power and Social Classes, p. 209.
14. Brian Henderson, "Toward a Non-Bourgeois Camera Style," Film
Quarterly 24:2 (Winter 1970-71). Is it perhaps a proletarian camera
style? A petty-bourgeois camera style? A camera style of the united
front? Or, inevitably, a camera style above class.
15. Martin Walsh, "Political Formations in the Cinema of Jean-Marie
Straub," Jump Cut 4, p. 13. Much of this theory (not Walsh's in
particular) derives from a mangled reading of Althusser — from
applying to ideological discourse the categories Althusser developed to
describe scientific discourse, thereby garbling his most fundamental
distinction.
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Jump Cut home
JUMP CUT
A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY MEDIA
Sound and color
by Edward Buscombe
from Jump Cut, no. 17, April 1978, pp. 23-25
copyright Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, 1978, 2005
The last issue of Film Reader JjQ devoted half of its total space to
examining the relations between industry, technology and ideology in
the cinema. Film Reader's initiative is a welcome sign that film theory is
paying more attention to economic and technological determinants and
that film history is increasingly moving out of the era of mere facts and
figures towards consideration of more substantive matters.
However, an article by J. Douglas Gomery in this issue, JAJ though
providing valuable detailed information on the introduction of sound
into Hollywood, raises some problems concerning the extent to which
economics can assist our understanding of the cinema. Gomery claims
that "economic theory can explain the coming of sound. "[3] Gomery has
in mind the theory of technological innovation. [4] This theory seeks to
explain the factors governing the invention, innovation and diffusion of
new technology in any given industry: in what circumstances new
techniques or products are first invented and then introduced as
practical and commercial propositions subsequently adopted by the
industry as a whole. A considerable literature exists on this subject, but
we may take as representative the work of one author cited by Gomery.
Edwin Mansfield, in his book Technological Change, [5I lists several
factors governing a decision to innovate once an invention has been
produced:
"To begin with, the firm should estimate, of course, the
expected rate of return from introducing the new product or
process. In the case of a new product the result will obviously
depend on the capital investment that is required to
introduce the innovation, the forecasted sales, the estimated
costs of production, and the effects of the innovation on the
costs and sales of the firm's existing product line.... In
addition the firm should estimate, as best it can, the risks
involved in innovating." [6]
Mansfield also enumerates those factors affecting the rate at which an
innovation will become diffused:
"l) the extent of the economic advantage of the innovation
over older methods or products, 2) the extent of the
uncertainty associated with using the innovation when it first
appears, 3) the extent of the commitment required to try out
the innovation, and 4) the rate of reduction of the initial
uncertainty regarding the innovation's performance"
(Mansfield, p. 88).
Mansfield also suggests that a number of factors might be expected to
affect the speed of any single firm's response to a new technique:
1. the size of the firm: one would expect larger firms with more
resources to be quicker at innovating.
2. the degree of expectation of profit from the new technique.
3 . the rate of growth of the firm: expanding firms might innovate
more easily.
4 . the firm's profit level: prosperous firms would have the necessary
capital or credit.
5 . the age of the firm's management personnel: younger
management might be more receptive to new ideas.
6. the liquidity of the firm: the more liquid the firm, the better it
might be able to find finance.
7 . the firm's profit trend: firms with declining profits might look
harder for new profits or techniques (Mansfield, p. 93-95).
There is nothing very profoundly "theoretical" about Mansfield's
formulations, yet they do have some explanatory power in relation to the
coming of sound. Gomery has shown that Warner Bros, did pay careful
attention to the question of costs and to the problem of finding the
necessary capital. [7] Furthermore Mansfield's four factors affecting the
rate of diffusion help to explain why the changeover to sound was so
rapid. The economic performance of the new product and the speedy
reduction in the uncertainty regarding that performance more than
outweighed the original uncertainty itself and the high costs of installing
new equipment.
The seven factors characterizing those firms most likely to innovate
should provide an explanation for the fact that it was Warners, one of
the smaller companies, which led the way in sound. Unfortunately, the
theory of technological innovation breaks down at this point, since
Mansfield can find no statistically significant correlations across a range
of industries for factors 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7. The only factors known to affect
a firm's willingness to innovate are its size (bigger firms do innovate
faster) and the expected rate of profit. The latter point seems fairly
obvious, while the former shows Warners to be an exception to the rule.
Gomery is forced to look elsewhere for an explanation of Warners'
actions, which were, he claims, the result of the farsightedness of
Waddill Catchings, the entrepreneur who masterminded the firm's
strategy.
Gomery's theoretical position therefore ends up not so far as he thinks
from that of the film historians he takes to task. He sets out to prove that
sound was introduced as the result of an economic law which "theory"
can explain. But instead, sound turns out to be the result of one man's
initiative. The only substantial difference between Gomery's explanation
and that of previous historians is a dispute over which individuals
should get the credit, Catchings or the Warner brothers themselves.
Thus the theory of technological innovation seems of limited use, and
Gomery reverts from a search for economic explanations back to a kind
of "great man" theory of history. But could a different kind of economic
theory explain the coming of sound? This would depend on what kind of
explanation we are looking for. The theory Gomery wants to use could
only explain why it is that innovation takes the course it does. It doesn't
explain why there should be innovations in the first place, a more
fundamental and surely more interesting question. To answer it, we
cannot adopt a simple notion of supply and demand, since the public
could hardly be said to have demanded sound pictures until it had seen
and heard them. True, once sound had been successfully demonstrated,
demand affected the rate of diffusion. But the initial investment in
research and development had to be made when future demand could
only be guessed at.
One must start with the fundamental law that in a free market economy,
a firm is motivated by, to use the terms of capitalist economics, a desire
to maximize profits; or, in the terms of Marxist economics, a desire to
maximize the rate at which it extracts surplus value. In any given
economic situation, this can be done in a number of ways. For example,
a firm can attempt to develop fresh markets and so achieve economies of
scale. In the late 20s, the film industry had no easy way of finding fresh
markets — domestic and foreign penetration of the market being near
saturation point. (In 1926 U.S. attendances ran at 100 million a week. In
Britain, for example, U.S. films had 74%% of the market at this time.)
Another possibility is for a firm to lower its costs of production. Given
that constant capital costs, both fixed and circulation (that is, the costs
both of buildings and machinery, and of raw materials), were relatively
inelastic, this could be done only be reducing the cost of variable capital,
i.e. labor. (I am assuming, though I cannot prove it, that in the film
industry in the late 20s, the costs of constant capital were in fact
inelastic.) But in a labor-intensive industry such as filmmaking, and one
in which automation had at that time gone as far as it could go (another
assumption I cannot actually prove), it seems as though there was little
opportunity for cutting costs. However, it is worth noting in this respect
that Warners' original motive in developing sound was to use it as a
means of recording vaudeville acts and musical sound tracks for silent
pictures. In other words, sound was at first intended to increase the
productivity of vaudeville performers and theatre musicians. Only
subsequently was it seen as a means of creating an entirely new product.
Another way for a firm to increase the rate of surplus value is to increase
its share of the existing market at the expense of its competitors. This
can sometimes be achieved by price cutting. But the U.S. film industry
had evolved by the end of the 1920s into a mature oligopoly in which the
sale of the product (i.e. exhibition) was tightly regulated by the major
firms dominating the market, in co-operation with each other. Each
production company needed the sales outlets (theatres) of the others in
order to market its products. Thus none of the large companies could
involve itself in a price war against the wishes of the others. The smaller
companies, who might have had most to gain from price competition,
were in the weakest position to do anything of the kind, because few of
them had theatres of their own and because the majors controlled the
most important theatres.
Only one way remains in such a situation for a company to secure an
advantage over its competitors. It can create a new product. In a sense,
of course, this happened all the time in Hollywood, since every picture
was unique and its uniqueness was protected by copyright. But precisely
because all products were unique, no company possessed a decisive
advantage. This required an innovation of a different order. Such an
innovation was sound, a wholly new kind of product, which would make
all other kinds obsolete. And the possession of this invention did,
indeed, for a time give Warners a chance to increase its share of the
market. (It seems likely also that it did for a while increase the absolute
size of the market, bringing new customers into the theatres. And it may
have helped postpone the decline in attendances brought on by the
depression.) The profits which a monopoly on a new product make
possible are known in Marxist economic theory as "technological rent."
[9] And the search for this monopoly explains why innovation should be
a necessary feature of the economic system even when business seems
good.
From this perspective, we should not view innovation in the film
industry as a rational and sought-for outcome of attempts on the part of
altruistic inventors to "improve" film technology, nor as proof of
capitalism's success in combining profit with the satisfaction of human
needs. Human needs are many, but capitalism will produce only those
innovations from which rent can be extracted, since the whole basis of
the system is production for exchange value rather than use value.
Sound would not have succeeded, admittedly, had not the public found a
use for it; but the public was given "what it wanted" only because sound
offered the opportunity for a monopoly. And the same principle applies,
mutatis mutandis, to any other technological innovation. The history of
the invention of the camera itself is written largely in the patents taken
out for each new modification.
Gomery argues convincingly against those film historians who claim
that Warners decided to produce sound films in a desperate gamble to
ward off bankruptcy. Gomery shows that the decision formed part of a
carefully thought-out strategy to upgrade the company's status to that of
a major, fiol But the case of sound (introduced by Warners and Fox, at
that time two of the smaller studios) does not show that technological
innovation in the cinema results only from a special set of
circumstances. An oligopoly reduces competition in certain areas; it
does not eliminate it altogether. Firms continue to compete with each
other, but the main form of competition takes the shape of a search for
new products. Innovation and technological rent are functions of the
system as a whole, not just the result of attempts by small firms to break
into the big time. The first three-component Technicolor film, for
example, was released by RKO and the first CinemaScope picture by
Twentieth-CenturyFox, both majors.
II
Economic theories can only partially explain technological innovations;
economics cannot say why innovations take the form they do, only why
they are an essential part of the system. Economics can explain the
necessary but not the sufficient conditions for innovation. No new
technology can be introduced unless the economic system requires it.
But a new technology cannot be successful unless it fulfills some kind of
need. The specific form of this need will be ideologically determined; in
the case of cinema the ideological determinant most frequently
identified has been realism. Whether the search for greater realism has
been welcomed, as in the case of Bazin's discussion of deep focus or
Charles Barr's of CinemaScope, fill or whether realism is subjected to a
fundamental critique, as in the case of writings by Comolli and Baudry,
f 12I theorists appear to agree that realism indeed dictates the formation
of the needs which technology satisfies.
But to define "realism is no simple matter. And while we may agree that
realism is dominant, it may not always be the only ideological need
fulfilled by technological innovations. The history of the use of color in
the cinema provides an interesting test case for the precise role of
realism. The scientific principles of color, like those of sound, were
known long before sound or color films became technically and
commercially feasible. With color, as with sound, the delay in its
introduction resulted in part from technical problems in producing a
system that would work under commercial operating conditions (early
color films were very prone to scratching, for example). But again as
with sound there was also resistance on aesthetic grounds. Douglas
Fairbanks, whose picture THE BLACK PIRATE (1927) was produced in
two-component Technicolor, complained that color had
"always met with overwhelming objections. Not only has the
process of color motion picture photography never been
perfected, but there has been a grave doubt whether, even if
properly developed, it could be applied, without detracting
more than it added to motion picture technic. The argument
has been that it would tire and distract the eye, take
attention from acting, and facial expression, blur and
confuse the action. In short it has been felt that it would
militate against the simplicity and directness which motion
pictures derive from the unobtrusive black and white." IT2I
Such objections appear rather strange if one supposes that the demand
for realism in the cinema has always been merely a question of the
literal rendering of appearances. We perceive the world as colored, after
all, and therefore an accurate representation of it should also be colored.
(Leaving aside the fact that complete accuracy is impossible since color
in film only approximates the colors perceived in the real world.) But in
fact it has never been a question of what is real but of what is accepted
as real. And when it first became technically feasible, color, it seems, did
not connote reality but the opposite.
This may in part be for historical reasons, since the very first uses of
color involved the tinting of certain sequences in films shot in black and
white. Such a usage was extremely conventional, a long way from a
literal representation of the world. And as I suggest below, there may be
more important reasons why color was not accepted as connoting
reality. At any rate, the objections to which Fairbanks refers are clearly
consistent with a realist aesthetic. Color would serve only to distract the
audience from those elements in the film which carried forward the
narrative: acting, facial expression, "the action." The unity of the
diegesis and the primacy of the narrative are fundamental to realist
cinema. If color was seen to threaten either one, it could not be
accommodated.
It thus becomes possible to understand why color took so much longer
to take hold than sound. The technical problems were probably no
greater, nor was it simply force of habit. Audiences accustomed to silent
pictures adapted to sound practically overnight. Color, on the other
hand, has become universal only since the advent of color television,
which lowered the relative resale (to television) value of theatrical
features made in black and white. Color technology has taken so long to
diffuse, we can conclude, partly because unlike sound it could not be
instantly accommodated to the realist aesthetic.
Further evidence of color's "unreality" for early spectators can be found
in the use actually made of it. For example, in the first few years after
the introduction of three-component Technicolor (originally used in the
Disney cartoon Flowers and Trees in 1932), the great majority of films
employing the process were produced within genres not notably realistic
in the sense of their being accurate representations of what "life" is
"like." It can be argued, of course, that not many Hollywood pictures
represent what life is like. But it nevertheless remains true that a kind of
hierarchy ranks genres according to the extent to which the world they
portray, fictional or not, is close to what the audience believes the world
to be like. Thus at one end of the scale, we find newsreels,
documentaries, war films, crime films, etc., and at the other, cartoons,
musicals, westerns, costume romances, fantasies, comedies. Virtually all
the early three-component Technicolor pictures are in these latter
genres.
Thus by the 1930s the original objection to color, that it would detract
from the narrative, had given way to the extent that color was
permissible in some films, and so therefore no longer totally
incompatible with audience concentration on a story. (Of course such an
objection as Fairbanks describes must always have been an extreme
position since certain uses of color such as tinting became quite
common very early on.) Yet it was still considered sufficiently unrealistic
to be taboo for films with "realistic" subject matter. fi5l
We must now return to the question of why color was not perceived as
realistic. Why was its use during the 1930s restricted to unrealistic
genres, whereas the use of sound was not? Color must surely have
connoted something else. What that something else was could, I think,
be demonstrated by an analysis of the color films produced.
But I propose instead to take a short cut and consult an industry manual
published in 1957, Elements of Color in Professional Motion Pictures.
fi 61 Written by a committee of film industry personnel, it distills the
collective theory and practice of color photography in Hollywood up to
the late 50s. By this time the use of color was no longer restricted to
certain genres; by the date of publication, the authors suggest, two-
thirds of all features were produced in color. Nevertheless, certain of
their remarks on the relation of color to realism shed some light on why
for a long time color was restricted to special uses.
For the authors of this book, one should note first of all, realism is never
to be equated with naturalism, strict fidelity to the world as it appears:
"This psychological factor can be of great importance in
creating an atmosphere of reality or verisimilitude on the
screen. With the filming of a historical or 'period picture,' for
example, research is done not only on architecture and
decoration, but also on the colors in use during the particular
period and in the specific country. Yet the use of the actual
colors of the period or the country are very rarely employed
(sic). Because of psychological factors governing the
response of a modern viewing audience, far better results are
achieved by the use of a desaturated tonality of the times —
that is, a less saturated range or 'palette' of color and pattern,
but adequately punctuated with authentic identifying colors
so that the end result stands to be identified as historically
accurate yet believable" ( Elements , pp. 41-42).
The colors we accept as real are therefore a compromise between what
we are accustomed to and what used to be. The need to make the
audience believe in what is depicted on the screen permits, indeed
demands, a distortion of what actually is, or was. Such a practice can, of
course, be observed in other aspects of Hollywood filmmaking, though
the practitioners are rarely so honest about what they are doing.
The authenticity of what the producers know to be false is guaranteed by
the other "realities" of the film, principally the narrative. The authors of
this textbook are in no doubt that it is to the narrative that color must
ultimately be subordinate.
"The objective being to have color 'act' with the story, never
being a separate entity to compete with or detract from the
dramatic content of the picture" ( Elements , p. 41).
Such a position is exactly what we should expect. But the book allows,
interestingly, for some exceptions to this rule; other values, it seems,
may conflict with the necessity of realism. First, there is the value of the
star:
"The feminine star, for example, whose appearance is of
paramount concern, must be given undisputed priority as to
the color of makeup, hair and costume which will best
complement her complexion and her figure. If her
complexion limits the colors she can wear successfully, this
in turn restricts the background colors which will
complement her complexion and her costumes to best
advantage" ( Elements , pp. 40-41).
Thus it is not simply the appearance of the real world (modified to make
it "believable") or the requirements of the narrative which dictate the
use of color. The values of stardom must have their place, even if they
are in conflict with the dictates of realism (which presumably might
demand background colors which did not suit the star.) That the
reference is to "feminine" stars alone makes it fairly clear what kind of
values are in question here.
But the authors challenge realism most strikingly in their remarks on
musical and fantasy pictures. In these genres, it seems, color may escape
the demands of realism. It need no longer be subordinate to plot and the
appearance of the real world:
"Musicals and fantasy pictures are open to unlimited
opportunities in the creative use of color. Here we are not
held down by reality, past or present, and our imaginations
can soar. Musicals and fantasies are usually designed to
provide the eye with visual pleasure in the way that music
pleases the ear" ( Elements , p. 42).
Thus these genres are privileged. Here the bonds of realism may be
slipped and the audience may give itself up to "pleasure. The musical,
interestingly, offers another means whereby the dictates of narrative can
be avoided, for although musical numbers are often motivated by the
plot, they do sometimes succeed in cutting free of narrative altogether
and functioning outside it.
Color, then, need not serve realism. It may simply provide pleasure. Yet
pleasure in the cinema is never a simple matter. The pleasures cinema
offers — the pleasures of realism itself or other kinds — are always
within ideology. What ideological forms do the purely visual pleasures of
color take? On this point the manual is silent, and we must return to the
films themselves.
The ideological appeal of color suggests two possibilities. First, color
must signify luxury or spectacle. Whether employed in the western to
enhance the beauties of nature, in the costume drama to portray the
sumptuousness of the Orient or the Old South, or in musicals to render
the dazzle and glamour of showbiz, color serves to embody a world other
than our own, into which, for the price of a ticket, we may enter. We
should not suppose, of course, that color must always signify luxury or
spectacle, since such a signification depends in part upon its scarcity
value and even on the mere fact of its costliness. Once color has become
normal in the cinema it begins to lose these connotations. One should
add, though, that in certain kinds of documentaries and even
occasionally in features, black and white is still used as a guarantor of
truth, which would not be possible unless their opposite, color, signified
something other than truth.
Second, color in early Technicolor pictures operates as a celebration of
technology: "Look how marvelous the cinema is!" Color, far from
providing a recognizable portrait of the real world, lifts us out of that
world, above its mundane problems and unreconcilable contradictions
into a new world where the limitations of the old are swept away and its
difficulties transcended. (Consider, for example, the relation between
the black and white and color sequences in THE WIZARD OF OZ.) Early
Technicolor functions as a form of self-reflexiveness, which instead of
deconstructing the film and destroying the illusion effects a kind of
reification of technology. Other forms of film technology function in the
same way: Cinerama, 3-D, even spectacular crane or helicopter shots all
having the effect, satirized in the Cole Porter song in SILK STOCKINGS:
"glorious Technicolor and breathtaking CinemaScope and stereophonic
sound." In this way, we might see color working to confirm Ernest
Mandel's statement,
"Belief in the omnipotence of technology is the specific form
of bourgeois ideology in late capitalism." f 17I
That color can function to signify luxury or celebrate technology does
not mean that these two uses of it are necessarily subversive of the
dominant cinematic ideology. Not everything which is not realism is
counter-cinema. Nevertheless, color clearly did function to an extent as
a contradiction of realism. Realism, though dominant, could not provide
all the things which were in demand. Realist ideology held out against
color first by denying its compatibility with narrative and then by
confining it to certain genres. Color, however, was able to satisfy needs
which realism could not. Were this not so, it is hard to see how, given its
unrealistic connotations, it could ever have been introduced at all. Since
the 1930s, however, color has become progressively absorbed back into
realism, with the result that the audience's need for spectacle and for
technological wonders has had to be satisfied by a succession of further
technological developments: wide screen, 3-D, Sensurround and so on.
Even wide screen has now (though in a form less wide than the original
CinemaScope) been absorbed into conventional technique. It seems at
least possible that a similar fate might have befallen 3-D and other
marvels had not they been too expensive for a contracting industry.
Notes
1. Film Reader 2 (1977).
2. Douglas Gomery, "Failure and Success: Vocafilm and RCA Innovate
Sound," Film Reader 2 (1977), 213-221.
3. Ibid., p. 219.
4. This is outlined in some detail in Gomery's doctoral thesis: "The
Coming of Sound to the American Cinema: a History of the
Transformation of an Industry," University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1975.
5. Edwin Mansfield, Technological Change (New York: 1971) is a
shortened version of his work The Economics of Technological Change
(New York: 1968), which Gomery cites.
6. Mansfield, Technological Change, pp. 77-8.
7. Douglas Gomery, "Writing the History of the American Film Industry:
Warner Bros, and Sound," Screen, 17, No. 1 (Spring, 1976).
8. Benjamin B. Hampton, History of the American Film Industry (New
York: 1970) pp. 362, 357.
9. Ernest Mandel in Late Capitalism (London: 1975), states:
"The continuous and systematic hunt for technological
innovations and the corresponding surplus profits becomes
the standard hallmark of late capitalist enterprises and
especially of the late capitalist large corporations" (pp. 223-
224).
10. Gomery, op. cit.
11. Andre Bazin, "The Evolution of the Language of Cinema" and
Charles Barr, "CinemaScope: Before and After," both reprinted in Film
Theory and Criticism, ed. Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen (New York:
1974 )-
12. Jean-Louis Comolli, in a series of articles "Technique et Idelogie"
beginning in Cahiers du cinema No. 231. Jean-Louis Baudry,
"Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus," Film
Quarterly, 28, No 2 (Winter, 1974-75), PP- 39 ~ 47 -
13. Quoted in A Technological History of Motion Pictures and
Television, ed. Raymond Fielding (Berkeley and Los Angeles: 1967), p.
54 -
14. Among the early three-component Technicolor films were: BECKY
SHARP (1935), THE GARDEN OF ALLAH (1936), TRAIL OF THE
LONESOME PINE (1936), SHOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS
(1937), NOTHING SACRED (1937), DRUMS (1938), THE
ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD (1938), GOLDWYN FOLLIES (1938),
SWEETHEARTS (1938), DODGE CITY (1939), GONE WITH THE
WIND (1939), NORTHWEST PASSAGE (1939), THE WIZARD OF OZ
(1939), JESSE JAMES (1939), THE THIEF OF BAGDAD (1939).
15.1 would not wish to assert that the slow diffusion of color technology
was solely due to ideological factors. Undoubtedly there were technical
problems, possibly greater than those encountered with sound films.
And because color was more expensive, there was an economic rationale
for reserving its use for pictures which were expensive in other ways and
which could be given special treatment by exhibitors (restricted runs in
large urban theatres, etc.). GONE WITH THE WIND would be an
example. My main point, however, is that economic factors never exist
in isolation, and that in the case of color economics and ideology are
mutually reinforcing. See the remarks about luxury and scarcity below.
16. Elements of Color in Professional Motion Pictures (New York: 1957).
17. Mandel, op. cit., p. 501.
To top Current issue Archived essays Jump Cut home
JUMP CUT
A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY MEDIA
His Girl Friday
Screwball liberation
by Tom Powers
from Jump Cut, no. 17, April 1974, pp. 25-28
copyright Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, 1978, 2005
Howard Hawks' film HIS GIRL FRIDAY (1940) represents one of the
major paradoxes of American narrative cinema — Hollywood's ability to
incorporate images of social change into films that ultimately deny and
frustrate the possibility of such change. HIS GIRL FRIDAY suggests that
new possibilities lie in the roles of the sexes. The film offers the alluring
mirage of a sexual relationship based on equality rather than
exploitation, with a woman achieving political-sexual parity through her
intelligence, creative energy and economic independence. In the process
of creating this relationship, however, the film mythologizes the roles of
men and women. It establishes as "natural" some modes of conduct that
are in fact economically and socially determined and that actually
predetermine the possibilities of meaningful change.
In his collection of essays Mythologies, Roland Barthes defines myth as
"depoliticized speech."
"Myth does not deny things; on the contrary, its function is
to talk about them; simply, it purifies them, it makes them
innocent, it gives them a natural and eternal justification, it
gives them a clarity which is not that of a explanation but
that of a statement of fact." (1)
Barthes shows that myths operate at every level of modern life by
constantly taking historical and ideologically motivated relations and
denying their historicity and ideology. The semiological implications for
film analysis are apparent immediately. For instance, when we see a
woman running in high heels with her skirt pulled up around her knees,
we recognize a certain level of signification, woman, through mode of
dress and activity. The function of myth becomes clearer when we
consider the assumptions contained in the sign: that it is natural for
women to dress differently than men and for their clothes to emphasize
certain parts of their anatomies; that it is natural for them to wear high
heels (women tend to be shorter than men, and height is a sign of
power); that it is natural for physical activity to be less becoming for
women, and that their clothing makes such activity more difficult. But
beneath all these layers of appearance and activity myths teach us to
regard as natural the social and economic exploitation that the myth of
femininity has been created to validate.
The principal myths operating in HIS GIRL FRIDAY are femininity,
manliness, domesticity and adventure. On the surface the film seems to
be attacking these traditional values. Despite the perversity of the title,
"his girl Friday" turns out to be a strong-willed, sharp-minded and
talented woman reporter. The reporter's boss (and ex-husband) satirizes
the romanticized violent image of men. He is equally zealous about his
profession and the fanatical pursuit of his ex-wife, and his blending of
the two pursuits results in humor and irony. The film as a whole
presents a more open and tolerant range of sexual values than one might
expect. Its irreverence occasionally borders on the risque particularly for
a film made under the Hays Code. Finally, HIS GIRL FRIDAY asserts
that corruption and injustice are the real foes and the proper targets of
democracy and a free press. Yet the illusions on the screen vanish when
the lights come on. Male dominance, female inequality, the family as the
basic unit of society and the ultimate impotence of political struggle
come home to the audience as enduring truths.
In shaping HIS GIRL FRIDAY, Hawks and screenwriter Charles Lederer
adapted the 1928 stage play, The FrontPage by Ben Hecht and Charles
MacArthur. In doing so, they changed the male reporter Hildy Johnson
to a female reporter, to be played by Rosalind Russell, and they
complicated matters further by making Hildy the ex-wife of editor
Walter Burns, played by Cary Grant. Structurally, these changes had two
major effects. They permitted the rapid-fire dialogue between Burns and
Johnson to incorporate the tension and feeling of a romantic situation
and created a framework within which to explore the sex roles of the
characters more fully. Moreover, by making Hildy a woman, the
filmmakers could draw on the popularity of the wisecracking,
independent screen heroine, who had emerged from the screwball
comedies of the mid-30s and had been given a good measure of depth by
actresses such as Barbara Stanwyck, Jean Arthur, Claudette Colbert,
Bette Davis and, of course, Rosalind Russell.
I'm not suggesting there is no sexual tension in The Front Page. Part of
the reason the Hildy Johnson character transfers so well to HIS GIRL
FIRDAY is that Hecht and MacArthur were exploring the levels of male
friendship that go beyond superficial camaraderie. The characters in the
play have a forced air of masculinity that works partly as a defense
mechanism against suggestions of effeminacy. When Hildy
acknowledges Walter's friendship at the play's end, he becomes
embarrassed and says, "Aw, Jesus, no, Walter. You make me feel like a
fairy or something. "(2} Hildy recognizes the strength of their
relationship even while denying its implications.
The violence of the male reporter — which is mainly verbal — transfers
easily to the female character, as does his professional competence and
some of his rowdiness. (The female Hildy smokes and drinks but doesn't
throw liquor bottles out the window.) Hawks always has revealed a
fondness for women who can hold their own with men, but he also likes
to manipulate our sexual preconceptions about these women. For
instance, in both the play and the film, Hildy tells Walter,
"I'm going to walk right up to you and hammer on that
monkey skull of yours until it rings like a Chinese gong."
With the male Hildy, the wit of the verbal imagery depends on our
knowing it's a bluff. The threat is neither immediate (it's spoken into the
telephone) nor real. But in HIS GIRL FRIDAY the words are spoken by a
woman whom we already have seen kicking Walter under the table, and
we certainly can imagine her pounding him over the head with her fist
or a shoe. For Hawks, physicality and violence are masculine realms, so
the intrusion of a woman into this territory provokes laughter — a
mirthful response to the inappropriateness of the situation. (Hawks
later reverses the situation and gets the same response when Walter
offers to kick Butch's woman friend in the teeth.) Yet the wit and pacing
of the dialogue mask this inappropriateness to some degree. We laugh at
Hildy even while we root for her. Even while we recognize that her
behavior is not "natural" for women, Rosalind Russell makes it seem
natural for Hildy. The delusion lies in myth's reaffirmation of what is
"natural" feminine behavior.
This kind of myth making seems to have been overlooked by many
critics of HIS GIRL FRIDAY. They pluck Hildy Johnson out of the
broader context of the film and label her "an image most relevant
today." (3} In an excellent analysis of the film, Molly Haskell strives to
find in Hildy a model for some broader perspective the film itself
actively resists. In analyzing Rosalind Russell's portrayal, Haskell says
she
"does not-become an imitation male; she remains true to the two sides
— feminine and professional — of her nature, and as such promises to
exercise a healthy influence on the hard-boiled, all-male world of
criminal reporting. It is as a newspaper reporter, rather than as wife and
mother, that she discovers her true 'womanliness,' which is to say,
simply, herself. "(4}
"You're a newspaperman," Walter Burns (Grant) tells his once and
future wife, Hildy (Russell). It's a line Hildy echoes later in the film: "I'm
no suburban bridge player — I'm a newspaperman." The dichotomy is
already established. The world of meaningful, male activity, work, is set
against the woman's world, the home. (5} "Can you picture Hildy singin'
lullabies and hanging out diapers?" says one of her fellow reporters.
"And swapping lies over the back fence?" adds another. No, but the
questions draw on the old values even while pretending to invoke new
ones. They aren't questions the all-male reporters would ask about each
other, even though their activities in the courthouse pressroom are not
far removed from back-fence gossiping. Hildy herself endorses this
notion of "feminine" conduct when she overhears the reporters later. She
says,
"It's getting so a girl can't leave the room without being discussed by a
bunch of old ladies."
Throughout the film both men and women are measured against certain
standards of conduct and achievement that Hawks considers specifically
masculine. The men can stray from these standards — like the reporters
— or can fail to meet them completely, in which case they become
objects of derision, unmanly men. Women, on the other hand are not
expected to meet these standards, and only the exceptional one does.
The film establishes Hildy Johnson as a woman who blends traditional
notions of feminine vulnerability and attractiveness (Walter calls her "a
doll-faced hick") with the masculine, Hawksian concepts of toughness
and competence.
To emphasize the uniqueness of her position, the filmmakers contrast
her with two stereotyped extremes of female conduct: the hysterical
female, who is a victim of men, and the dominating woman, who accepts
her own exploitation in order to manipulate men. Mollie Malloy (Helen
Mock) is a caricature of high-strung female sensitivity who throws
herself out the window in a fit of hysterics. The film version plays down
any notion that Mollie is a prostitute (6), not merely to "purify" her love
for condemned murderer Earl Williams but also to make her even more
of a victim, the too-frail representative of the frail sex. This allows Hildy
some leeway in expressing her emotions without the risk of appearing
too feminine. Likewise, Hildy's toughness does not approach that of
Evangeline, the blonde hooker Walter Burns employs to cause trouble
for Hildy's fiance. Evangeline has perverted the male notion of
femininity. She coldly uses her sex appeal to exploit the men who would
exploit her.
Perhaps the most troubling of the minor female characters is Mrs.
Baldwin (Alma Kruger), Hildy's prospective mother-in-law. Her part is
small and intentionally comic but important to deal with, for she is the
logical extension of the "suburban bridge player" Hildy might have
become. The figure of the respectable woman who dominates men — a
figure the courier Pettibone's off-screen wife embodies also — is the
most threatening to Hawks' notion of the balance of the sexes. She
evokes the specter of male impotence and thus makes the idea of sexual
equality seem precarious and dangerous, an undertaking for exceptional
people only. Moreover, she strikes at the male's definition of himself —
not merely his sexual identity, but the identity he achieves through what
he does. Hecht and MacArthur describe Peggy, the male Hildy's fiancee
in The Front Page in terms applicable to Mrs. Baldwin:
"As a matter of fact, Peggy belongs to that division of
womanhood which dedicates itself to suppressing in its
lovers or husbands the spirit of D'Artagnan, Roland, Captain
Kidd, Cyrano, Don Quixote, King Arthur or any other type of
the male innocent and rampant. "(7)
In her unconscious and highly noble efforts to make what the female
world calls 'a man' out of Hildy, Peggy has neither the sympathy nor
acclaim of the authors.
In many ways the female Hildy is virtually one of the boys. When one of
the reporters addresses her as "Hildegard," we realize how deep their
level of acceptance runs: they can even kid her about having a woman's
name. They invite her to join their poker game and read her interview
with the condemned murderer in tones of awed reverence. Yet they
define her possibilities in terms inapplicable to themselves:
"I still say that anybody who can write like that ain't gonna
give it up permanently to sew socks for a guy in the
insurance business."
Hildy's competence is not a threat to the reporters but the price of
admission to their all-male world, the price she has to pay to escape the
world of female entrapment in domesticity.
Yet Hildy's acceptance by the men also results in her mistreatment as a
woman. Part of the film's humor lies in the frustration of Hildy's desire
to be "feminine," to have men light her cigarettes and open car doors for
her. In one shot Hildy gallantly holds open one swinging gate for Walter,
who graciously acknowledges her gesture. He then proceeds to shut the
next gate on her knees, with the tracking camera movement leaving
Hildy behind as thoughtlessly as Walter does. Walter's conscious
violation of the rules of chivalry — wearing his hat around Hildy,
grabbing her light for his own cigarette, smirking while she struggles
with a heavy suitcase — reinforces the notion that Hildy must struggle to
become part of the men's world. The audience is made to root for her,
particularly since the alternative is marriage to her sickeningly sweet
fiance, Bruce (Ralph Bellamy). Yet we also laugh when Walter discovers
a soft spot in Hildy's facade of toughness.
Away from Walter, Hildy is much more in command, so much so that we
realize her only logical partner is her ex-husband. Hildy has courage
(she takes a gun away from the escaped Earl Williams and lays a flying
tackle on Warden Cooley) and wit. She can talk roughly ("...shot the
professor right in the classified ads") and sometimes even brutally
(Louie: "You better give me a receipt"; Hildy: "I'll give you a scar"). She
smokes and drinks and her actions contrast with the men who don't,
particularly Bruce and Earl.
But the film never allows us to forget Hildy is a woman and must
conform to certain "womanly" patterns of behavior. When she runs after
Warden Cooley, her skirt pulled up around her knees and her high heels
making her totter precariously, we realize to what degree the humor of
the film depends on our assumptions of how women normally behave,
and we realize how many conventions of femininity Hildy embraces.
When the reporters kid her about her new hat, she laughs them off, but
a tinge of defensiveness comes through. She says,
"I paid twelve bucks for that hat."
Clothes are a major concern of the depression-era screen heroine, one of
the clearest places where economic hardship challenged male-dictated
notions of fashion and femininity. (8) Hildy clings to those notions even
when it hurts. She is a woman and wants to be treated like a woman, not
like a frilly object and not like a fake man. At the end of the film, when
she breaks down and cries, she reveals an emotional honesty none of the
men is capable of, a strength of feeling that would be a weakness for
them. In a way it costs her. At the end of the film she cannot be
considered Walter's equal. She is a woman and a reporter, but she also is
in love, an eager puppy grateful for her acceptance into a world in which
she does not yet belong.
As editor Walter Burns, Cary Grant creates a depiction of manliness that
in some ways is a more subtle manipulation of our preconceptions than
Russell's femininity. We know how women are supposed to behave, and
we recognize deviations from that behavior as either humorous or
intrepid. Men have more leeway. They can be strong without being
physical, passionate without being weak. Walter Burns reeks of power.
In the film's terms this is economic and political power (Walter
apparently controls the newspaper), but Walter seems to personalize it.
People respond to his character because of who he is, not because of the
position he holds. They are swept away by his wit, presence and
fanatical zeal for the newspaper game. But Walter Burns also is a man in
love, and his pursuit of Hildy is no less fanatical. At times he's like a
juggler keeping plates spinning in the air, with Hildy on one side, the
Earl Williams news story on the other, a host of lesser concerns all
around him.
The effect is not to nullify any one of his passions but to give them all a
sense of irony. It is a much more complex role than the very similar
parts Grant plays in THE PHILADELPHIA STORY (1940) and THE
AWFUL TRUTH (1937). In both those films he tries to win back an ex-
wife, and in the latter he even tries to prevent her marriage to Ralph
Bellamy, yet neither film clearly defines him in terms of what he does.
His ardor consumes his character in these films and makes him seem
one-dimensional.
In HIS GIRL FRIDAY, Rosalind Russell clearly is the only person in the
film who comes close to matching Grant's energy and wit, and Hildy is
the only reporter talented enough to write the interview Walter Burns
needs. This intermeshing of personal and professional interests proves
to be the battleground where Walter Burns ultimately wins back both
his reporter and his wife. Hildy cannot play both games at once: she is
too honest, but she also is too vulnerable. Her heart wins out in the end.
In the crucial confrontation between editor and reporter, a long tracking
shot done in one continuous take, Walter restrains Hildy from running
after Mrs. Baldwin and begins gently but firmly pushing her around the
pressroom. She backs away from him, but he guides her as if in a dance,
prodding her, turning her, physically dominating her, all the while
weaving a hypnotic spell with his ceaseless talking, his glib rendition of
what Hildy stands to accomplish as a reporter, saving Earl Williams,
cleaning up corruption, giving the city a chance for "the kind of
government New York's having under LaGuardia," the whole rhythm of
his lies expressing the singularity of his purpose: to win Hildy back to
him, as reporter and as lover. "But Walter," she says, "I never figured it
that way." "Nah," says Walter, "you're still a doll faced hick, that's why."
By the time Hildy emerges from her delirium of professional glory and
realizes how she has been manipulated, she is incapable of fighting back
even on the personal level. She concedes, she cries. Walter, on the other
hand, is back spinning plates, combining plans for a second honeymoon
trip to Niagara Falls with the chance to cover a strike in Albany.
Walter's physical domination of Hildy is another level at which the film
reinforces our assumptions. Men operate in a sphere of violence. The
film begins on the eve of an execution and ends with the outbreak of a
strike. In between there are shootings, kidnappings, fights, a jailbreak
and a car crash. Hawks turns much of this violence into parody: the
ineptness of the Sheriff and police, the bumbling earnestness of Louie
the gunsel, the glib viciousness of the mayor. Walter vacillates between
childish fantasies of violence — dynamiting the four o'clock train to
Albany ("Could we?"), hoping Mrs. Baldwin was killed in the auto
accident ("Was she? Was she?") — to sophisticated satirizations of the
tough-guy role. He wears his hat throughout the second half of the film,
using it as a prop to reinforce the mugging and posturing of his hoodlum
characterizations. Yet when Walter grabs Hildy's wrist, there's no
question who's the stronger. Hildy may make isolated physical gestures,
but they're intrusions into the male domain. It simply takes a strong
man to put her in her place.
Like Hildy, Walter occupies a middle ground between two extremes of
supposedly traditional behavior. He can be aggressive and physical
without approaching the violence of a character like Louie (Abner
Biberman) or be sensitive and sincere without seeming weak, like Bruce
or Pettibone (Billy Gilbert). Yet all these men adhere to certain
standards of male behavior that in turn enrich their characters. Louie
may be a hood, the traditional overcompensating small man, but he also
is incongruously vulnerable. He allows Walter to lift him up like a child
in order to let him get a look at Bruce on the other side of a partition. He
gallantly defends Evangeline's reputation ("She ain't no albino. She was
born right here in this country.") He even politely introduces himself to
the elderly Mrs. Baldwin before carting her off bodily. The harried
Pettibone, on the other hand, is exploited constantly by everybody yet
nevertheless finds the courage to resist the corrupt mayor's bribe and
deliver Earl Williams' reprieve.
As Hildy's fiance, Bruce, Ralph Bellamy gives a remarkable
performance. He is the classic milquetoast, an insurance salesman from
the sticks who lives with his mother and doesn't go out without his
umbrella and rubbers. He is graceless in contrast to Walter's
smoothness, bumping Hildy's hat as he helps her on with her coat; full
of untested bravado ("If things get rough, remember I'm here."); naive
and gullible amid the flurry of put-ons and putdowns that whiz past his
head; and rather depressingly confident of his own worth and that of his
profession. His very dullness stands out in contrast to the mystique of
adventure that "real men" are supposed to embrace. Yet Bellamy gives
his character such depth and gentleness that one can appreciate Hildy's
attraction to him.
Walter does not recognize Bruce as a true rival, but he sees the need to
adopt some of Bruce's sensitivity toward Hildy if he's to win her back.
His smugness toward Hildy in the opening scenes gives way to
tenderness at the film's conclusion. When he tells Hildy to go back to
Bruce, he says,
"I'm trying to do something noble for once in my life ... I was
jealous. I was sore because he can offer you the kind of life I
can't give you."
It's a lie, of course, but in its own way it's also a concession. Beneath all
the glibness and cynicism there lies a certain sense of loss, of
incompleteness. For just a moment Walter offers Hildy his vulnerability.
It's hard to imagine Walter and Hilda maintaining the same frantic pace
for the rest of their lives together. The impulse towards domesticity is a
strong one. Earlier in the film Hildy declares,
"I'm gonna be a woman, not a news getting machine. I'm
gonna have babies and take care of them and give 'em cod
liver oil and watch their teeth grow and, and — oh dear, if I
ever see one of 'em look at a newspaper again, I'm gonna
brain 'em..."
Throughout the film there are numerous references to people's families
and children. People getting married and settling down and raising
children appears as the natural order of things. If Walter and Hildy's
unconventional behavior strikes at the dullness of this order, it
nevertheless validates the conventions that define bourgeois marriage:
jealousy, fidelity, monogamy, heterosexuality, the separation of home
and work, and the preeminence of romantic love.
The film adopts a sophisticated pose toward sex, but the pervasiveness
of traditional values makes the pose humorous. Walter pretends to be
shocked when he hears that Bruce and Hildy are taking the sleeper train
to Albany the night before their marriage. (Bruce assures him that
Mother will be chaperone.) Later Walter and Hildy laugh over their own
premarital affair. ("Yeah, we could've gone to jail for that, too, you know
that"). But the activities of one sophisticated couple do not present an
alternative to the "naturalness" of the established order. Wit and
zaniness and frantic activity may be an antidote to boredom, but they
offer no remedy for the systematic, structured inequalities that produce
boring lives. All the characters' energy — and all the viewers' attention —
is misdirected. One is left with the feeling that it's possible to change
one's own life but not human nature. And since the film presents
domesticity as a natural state, even the possibilities of personal growth
seem limited, (q)
In a world where political action is not a viable alternative, the pursuit of
adventure tends to take on special significance. Hildy and Walter are
journalists on a quest: for them the activity is an end in itself. City
politics, Earl Williams' hanging, Mollie's attempted suicide, fires and
strikes and jailbreaks are only secondary concerns. Their real interest is
the adventure of being a reporter. When Hildy tells Walter that
insurance is an honest profession, he laughs in her face.
"Oh, certainly it's honest. It's also adventurous, romantic."
The faded Galahads of the pressroom provide the only true alternative
to the pursuit of adventure; they offer the wise and tired cynicism of
men who have dealt too long with the seamy side of life and now realize
how little can be done to change it. If they seem callous in asking the
sheriff to move up the time of Earl Williams' hanging to meet their
deadlines, they are vindicated by the fact that the hanging had been
postponed twice to accommodate a citywide election campaign.
The reporters wisecrack about everything from national government ("Is
this guy Egglehoffer any good?" "Figure it out for yourself. He's the guy
they sent to Washington to interview the Brain Trust. He said they were
sane") to local politics ("The sheriff has just put two hundred more
relatives on the payroll to protect the city against the Red Army, which
leaves Moscow at noon tomorrow") to Mollie's tears. ("Aw, go put on a
phonograph"). Their conversation is the most blatantly sexual in the
film. "Stairway Sam," who spends a good part of his time looking up
women's dresses, describes a woman "with big brown eyes" — his hands
outlining her torso.
Several films of the 30s nurtured this image of the cynical reporter in
the popular consciousness at that time. The movies needed a figure who
could combine the cynicism and street wisdom of the gangster (whose
popularity in films was declining) with the more positive outlook
engendered by the New Deal and endorsed by the Hays Office: someone
who was on the right side but wouldn't look like a sap if righteousness
didn't prevail. (10) Born amid the yellow journalism of the Hearst-
Pulitzer era, given a muckraking conscience by people like Lincoln
Steffens and an urbane cynicism by Mencken and the journalists of the
20s, the newspaper reporter emerged as the popular hero of the 30s.
The reporter's everyday life was an adventure, and its appeal to
Depression audiences was striking. (11)
The appeal was, of course, an illusion — an illusion HIS GIRL FRIDAY
fosters. Labor as a meaningful activity does not exist outside the context
of adventure, except as the province of fools like Bruce and Pettibone.
Earl Williams (John Qualen) is the film's representative proletarian
figure: "He was a bookkeeper. Starts at twenty dollars a week and after
fourteen years works his way up to seventeen-fifty." The film doesn't
allow him the political conscience of the anarchist character in The
Front Page but rather reduces him to the status of an ineffectual victim
of forces outside his control and understanding. HIS GIRL FRIDAY
touches on the contemporary problems of the Depression but offers its
audience commiseration rather than analysis, escape rather than
solutions. If alienated labor is the natural condition of humankind, then
hope lies in adventure or resignation, not in economic and political
change.
"In passing from history to nature, myth acts economically: it
abolishes the complexity of human acts, it gives them the
simplicity of essences, it does away with all dialectics, with
any going back beyond what is immediately visible, it
organizes a world which is without contradictions because it
is without depth, a world wide open and wallowing in the
evident, it establishes a blissful clarity: things appear to
mean something by themselves." (T2)
Myth is seductive. I've seen HIS GIRL FRIDAY several times and look
forward to seeing it again. I enjoy its wit and energy and am taken in by
its characters. The women I know are not embarrassed or angry at
Rosalind Russell's portrayal of Hildy: she's a strong and imaginative
character. As Bruce says of her,
"Everybody else I've known before, well, you could always
tell ahead of time what they were going to say or do. Hildy's
not like that."
Hildy and Walter's relationship approaches a kind of sexual balance,
with both partners moving away from the economic imbalance of the
home/work separation. Yet this is the film's major deception. It suggests
possibilities at the level of individual action while denying the
application of such possibilities at any wider political level. It
depoliticizes the individual gesture by basing our interpretation of it on
the myth of sex roles.
Notes
n Roland Barthes, Mythologies (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), p.
143, trans. Annette Lavers.
2^ Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, The Front Page (New York:
Covici-Friede, 1928), p. 187. This element of homosexuality, which runs
throughout the play, is alluded to only once in HIS GIRL FRIDAY, when
Hildy tells the reporter Bensinger she might let him be her bridesmaid.
3. Marjorie Rosen, Popcorn Venus (New York: Avon Books, 1973), p.
214.
4. Molly Haskell, From Reverence to Rape (Baltimore, Md.: Penguin
Books, 1974), p. 135.
5^ In the play, the male Hildy says, "I'm no stuffed shirt writing peanut
ads ... God damn it — I'm a newspaperman." (p. 138). For him the choice
has other implications.
(l. In the play she is described as "a North Clark Street tart... She is a
soiled and gaudy houri of the pavement" (p. 78).
T^Hecht and MacArthur, p. 78.
R MARKED WOMAN, GOLDDIGGERS OF 1933 and STAGE DOOR all
deal with the importance of clothes in terms of women's self¬
conceptions and economic possibilities.
cl The Polish filmmaker Andrzej Zulawski explores the futility of this
good-humored approach to domestic-relations in the 1973 film
L'IMPORTANT C'EST D'AIMER (THAT MOST IMPORTANT THING ...
LOVE).
to. For further material along this line see Andrew Bergman, We're in
the Money (New York: Harper and Row, 1972).
in For an extensive listing of newspaper films of the thirties see Pauline
Kael, "Raising Kane," The Citizen Kane Book (Boston: Little, Brown and
Co., 1971), p. 20.
12. Barthes, p. 143.
To top Current issue Archived essays Jump Cut home
JUMP CUT
A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY MEDIA
Brecht and the politics of
self-reflexive cinema
by Dana B. Polan
from Jump Cut, no. l, 1974, pp.
copyright Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, 1974, 2004
In a 1940s Bugs Bunny cartoon, Elmer Fudd, once again forced by
destiny and by narrative to chase Bugs, fires several times at his fleeing
nemesis. The bullets fail to have their desired effect. Of course, the lack
of deadliness is a typical quality of Warners cartoon bullets, but this
time Bugs stops and comments to the audience:
"Folks, those bullets are fake; we're saving the real ones for
the boys overseas."
For me, this moment aptly demonstrates the attitudes an artwork can
adopt towards the material world and the dynamics of history, [l] First,
a distance from worldly reality, a distance inherent in art and which
makes it art. This is a distance of codes and of constructions — a
distance which, if it allows the work to be a form of knowledge, does so
only in a mediated or in a nonscientific fashion. £2} The cartoon is first
of all a cartoon and not something else. Second, a distance in which the
work turns in on itself and speaks about its own artistic conventions and
presuppositions. This is an attitude of self-reflexivity, of the text making
strange its own formal devices. For example, at the moment in question,
the cartoon explicitly signals its cartoonness. Finally, there is a third
attitude which the cartoon brings to the foreground at this moment: a
movement out of the self-enclosed world of the artwork toward a real
world which the mediations of art usually leave behind. The cartoon
reminds us of an activity — killing — which cartoons normally distort.
These attitudes — the inherent one which makes art art and not
something else, and the forced ones which appear as a conjunction of or
a conflict between self-reflexivity and social awareness — form the
primary concerns of this essay.
To me, the two most important signs, if we may call them that, in my
title are the question mark and the word "towards." For a skepticism
motivates this paper, a discontent which manifests itself as a set of
tentative forays into an overcharted region. To raise the question of the
politics — intrinsic or otherwise — of self-reflexive film is to re-invoke
issues of central inportance in the history of film theory, if not art theory
in general. How does film relate to a reality? To an audience? What is
form? What is content? How are they political? If they are not political,
how can they be made so? Here I don't pretend to be able to answer
such awesome questions but merely to propose some movements
towards their investigation, movements towards a politics of self¬
reflexive film.
In their recent manifestation, debates on these issues have generally
come to revolve around a single object of inquiry: viewing. What does it
mean to view a film? What happens ideologically when we view a world
on a screen before us. At first glance, the activity of viewing may seem to
be simple, both in its workings and in its ability to be understood. Yet
the surface simplicity obscures a deeper intricacy. In Reading Capital,
French philosopher Louis Althusser suggests that the great achievement
of the modern age — an achievement which describes that age's break
with the past — has been the
"discovery and training in the meaning of the 'simplest' acts
of existence: seeing, listening, speaking, reading..."
Freud, he suggests, pinpointed the dimensions of speaking, Marx those
of reading. Similarly, recent criticism of the visual arts — such as that
criticism of painting by Pierre Francastel and John Berger or of film by
recent writers in Screen — he is attempting, I would suggest, to
understand ways of seeing.
Indeed, recent film theory's "critique of illusionism" derives from the
same theoretical impulse as the critique of empiricism put forward by
Althusser and others. To these theorists, empiricism or illusionism
depends upon a conception of the subject-object duality as easily
bridged. £3} The world manifests truth, and all one has to do is
contemplate the world or its identical embodiment in human activity —
texts — to gain insights into that meaning.
Clearly, Andre Bazin epitomizes the film version of this optimistic
theory of the possibilities of meaning. With such notions as the close-up
as window to the soul, as the destructiveness of conscious artistic
intervention, and film as the revelation of the spiritual life (vie
interieure ) of the world, Bazin becomes the target for many, if not most,
newer theories which see film as a production of meaning, as a site of
work in the viewer's consciousness.
Narrative, and its ostensible canonization in Hollywood, also becomes a
target. In S/Z, Roland Barthes clearly sees the hermeneutic and the
proairetic codes (the codes of suspense and of the logic of actions,
respectively) as the most determined and determining codes of fiction.
Similarly, Noel Burch in an interview in Women and Film (No. 5/6)
declares linearity — i.e., narrative — to be an inherent code of what he
calls the "dominant cinema." Against narrative and against
transparency, critics and artists suggest a whole range of deconstructive
devices. Many of these strategies are based on a notion of work.
Empiricism, it is claimed, invites passivity; all one has to do is
contemplate and texts will deliver up their meaning. Subjects — be they
viewing subjects, reading subjects, or historical subjects — will unite
automatically with objects and with the knowledge of objects. To
counter the encouragement of passivity, many recent critics push for a
difficult art, an art that forces its audience into an active interpretive
response. The problem of passivity further provides the impetus for a
rediscovery of Brecht, who, for recent critics, has become the master of
deconstruction, the champion of formal subversion. Burch, for example
in Theory of Film Practice, adopts Brecht's theory but only after
declaring it necessary to eliminate Brecht's concern for content. A new
Brecht — Brecht the formalist — arises.
But there is also, and foremost, Brecht the realist. And it is this Brecht
who will provide my perspective here. I believe that radical aesthetics —
including film aesthetics — is falling prey to the rise of a new ahistorical
formalism. This formalism is present in attacks on particular types of
cinema practice and cinema structure — the practices, as I have
mentioned, of narrative and of representation.
But more recently, with the French and British rediscovery of Freud
through Jacques Lacan, the attack on representation has become even
more pronounced. Whereas formerly a certain type of film practice
which was alone in effecting a particular audience response (namely,
passivity) was singled out for attack, now the very practice of
representation undergoes criticism as being ideologically reactionary. In
this view, the very structure of film viewing — audiences sitting before a
screen and watching from a particular viewpoint (or perspective) —
contributes to the constitution of the subject as a viewing subject — that
is, a subject safely elevated by self-confidence to a privileged,
unchallenged position vis-a-vis the screen world. Thus in an article on
television in a recent issue of Screen (Summer, 1977), Gillian Skirrow
and Stephen Heath go so far as to declare that "there is a generality of
ideological position." Certainly, the recent critics often differ as to the
sorts of films which contribute most to this non-challenge to the
supposed passivity of viewing. But at its limit, this psychological model
suggests that the very (f)act of seeing a film, regardless of the film story,
turns spectators into non-acting subjects. In his essay on "Diderot,
Brecht, Eisenstein," ( Screen , Summer, 1974), Roland Barthes banishes
content from art and declares that
"representation is not defined directly by imitation: even if
one gets rid of notions of the 'real,' of the 'vraisemblable,' of
the copy, there will still be representation for so long as a
subject casts his gaze towards a horizon on which he cuts out
an apex..."
Barthes is thereby able to declare that Brecht and Eisenstein are pre¬
political artists since they don't break out of a presentational model.
Jean-Pierre Oudart's examination of the influence of classical
perspective on film and Jean Louis Baudry's description of the
ideological effects of the basic cinematographic apparatus also move in
the same direction. [4] This rejection of representation suggests not only
a subversion from within but also from without. Critics and artists push
for new artistic experiences which will call the traditional boundaries of
the arts into question. But the overriding question remains: Is this sort
of aesthetic undermining the political?
In part, an answer depends on what we mean by political. To give a
definition obviously open to disagreement, I would suggest that the
political concerns itself with analyzing and then proposing answers to
the contradictions of a particular historical situation. Obviously, the
recent formalistic critics might contend that the formal innovations of
works which challenge viewing experiences serve as such an
investigation of historical contradictions. For example, in the 1972
postscript to Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, Peter Wollen declares
that a new art would cause the spectator to
"produce fissures and gaps in the space of his own
consciousness (fissures and gaps which exist in reality but
which are repressed by an ideology, characteristic of
bourgeois society, which insists on the 'wholeness' and
integrity of each individual consciousness)" (p. 162, my
emphasis).
Wollen partially covers his own tracks by declaring that such a
repression is characteristic of and not intrinsic to bourgeois society, but
that disclaimer is itself uncharacteristic of the radical formalist
approach where a rigid either/or divides the progressive from the
reactionary. The new aesthetic, if I may reductively sum it up, bases
itself on a belief that texts repress, that they lead to a domination of
their subjects by placing those subjects in a particular position,
physically, formally, perhaps ideologically. A text, in this sense, is an
ensemble of codes which rationalize a particular way of relating to the
world. And they make this rationalization attractive by not interfering
with the fetishistic or voyeuristic perspective of the
viewing subject. In his essay, "The Politics of Separation" (Screen,
Winter 75/76), Colin McCabe goes so far as to call this seduction "the
bribe of identity," thereby situating textual persuasion in the realm of
crime.
It seems to be though that his sort of position leaves a lot of points
unanswered or at least ambiguous. Before we can examine the validity of
certain subversive strategies as answers, we need to make sure that the
problem has been correctly understood. We need to examine the notion
of textual domination.
Such a notion, especially as a critique of representation, rests upon a
great number of assumptions. I would like to concentrate on two of
these: that texts confirm the world and blind us to contradictions, and
that submission to a text means submission to its ideology. The belief in
a bribe of identity sees the texts as a complicity of codes, a rhetoric
which hides its own rhetorical nature. Thus, critics like McCabe see the
text as a force of domination over spectators. However, we need to
rigorously investigate such an argument. What does domination, in
terms of a work of art, mean?
All texts dominate. Without a degree of code-sharing between art
makers and art receivers, the artwork becomes a noise. To alter
McCabe's economic metaphor (which he obviously does not mean as a
metaphor), texts aren't bribes; they are contracts in which spectators or
readers willingly agree to relate to codes in a certain way and, I would
contend, with knowledge usually of the workings of many of these codes.
The signs of the contract appear throughout the texts; they may become
familiar to us but precisely because they are signs, we have to learn them
to be able to read or to view. And yet submission to a contractual
promise is only one side of the working of a text. Information theory
emphasizes not only that information ceases without a common code
but also that it ceases if a transgression of codes does not appear, a
transgression actually inherent in the system and which expands it.
Art, all art, bases itself not just on confirmation but also on
contradiction. Literary critic Frank Kermode has alternatively described
this interplay as one between credulity and skepticism (in The Sense of
an Ending ) or between recognition and deception ("Novels: Recognition
and Deception," Critical Inquiry, No. l). To a large extent, what we refer
to as self-reflexivity represents one more strategy in the interplay of a
technique intrinsic to and actually defining the process of art. One sort
of pleasure comes from precisely this interplay of credulity and
skepticism (which may explain why detective fiction — which in many
ways ideally embodies many of the workings of the code of suspense —
is so popular). Self-reflexive art appeals in part because it heightens this
intrinsic interplay.
If we survey the development of the literary and dramatic arts, we
continually come across examples of art which signal awareness of their
own artifice. Literary critics often point to Laurence Sterne's 18th
Century novel Tristram Shandy as a special highpoint of conscious
artistic artifice; in a revealing comment, Russian Formalist critic Viktor
Shklovsky called it "the most typical novel in world literature." Yet in the
same literary period, Henry Fielding's Tom Jones goes as far as Sterne's
book in uncovering the codes which a reading of literature depends
upon. Fielding, for example, explicitly invokes the model of a contract by
comparing the novel to a meal where there is a certain interplay between
the fixed order of courses and the changing identities of the foods within
that order. But the difference between Tristram Shandy and Tom Jones
is one of degree, not a break. Similarly, both texts are no more than a
logical culmination of a tendency and a characteristic of art. But the
recent formal aesthetic has little awareness of degrees. Roland Barthes,
for example, has declared that modernism was not really a possibility for
art until 1850; he thereby ignores the fact that every artistic period is an
interplay between tradition and artistic revolution. We need to examine
different types and degrees of artifice and relate them both to the history
of their production and of their reception.
Standard humanist literary and art criticism has long been able to
accommodate transgressions of the rules. The usual schema is to see
such transgressions as necessary to a progress that otherwise would
stultify. Obviously this accommodation could be considered an instance
of coopting but only that which can be coopted can be coopted. Critics
have long been able to situate modernism in a non-revolutionary
aesthetic. One could cite many examples of this accommodation.
Recently two books of literary criticism (Robert Alter's Partial Magic
and Albert Guerard's The Triumph of the Novel) have celebrated what
both authors call "the Great Other Tradition," thereby expanding the
establishment, the canon, the Great Books of the Western World,
beyond the limits proscribed by F.R. Leavis. £5] Both critics (and there
are many others) turn aesthetic disturbances into positive, humanist
values. To be more precise, they recognize literary, formal innovation for
what it is: a non-threatening, typical component of art. Guerard, for
example, refers to the novel's powers of "illuminating and imaginative
distortion": literature can introduce an imbalance for the precise
purpose of establishing a higher balance. Today's revolution is
tomorrow's handservant of the established order. In its literal sense, the
term avant-garde suggests nothing more than an advance force, a
forward branch of the establishment.
The Russian Formalist Viktor Shlovsky argued for art as ostranenie : a
making strange of the world. And indeed if art confirms, it also makes
strange the normal order of things. Suspension of belief accompanies
suspension of disbelief. But recent criticism would like to obscure this
condition. Hollywood has been declared a paradigm of a fundamental
lack of irony, of a celebration of art as transparency. The heritage of
recent film critics from literary critical models with their high
art/popular art distinction is obvious. Recent radical literary criticism
has committed historical and theoretical errors by adhering to a
conception of the novel based on 19th century forms. In fact, the 19th
century novel is only one type of literature — and one that is itself not
without its ironies and formal subversions. Similarly, there is no one
type of Hollywood film; indeed, very few actual Hollywood productions
would fit the abstract category of transparency which recent criticism
has instituted as the Hollywood paradigm.
With the new formalistic critics a particular conception of Hollywood
cinema is made to monolithically serve as the type of all classical films.
A few exceptions crop up: the nonconformist auteurs like Nick Ray or
Sam Fuller. But Hollywood itself is defined as conformist, as the
ultimate briber, the ultimate concealer of codes.
All art is distanced. This is as true of Hollywood as of Laurence Sterne or
Aristophanes. We learn to read through this distance from material
reality, but we also learn to want new distances. Hollywood not only
presents unreality as reality; it also openly acknowledges its unreality. In
his book America in the Movies, Michael Wood even suggests that
unreality can become formulaic. Campiness is not only a subgenre of
films but a tendency of most if not all Hollywood films, and Wood
suggests that this distance represents one cause of Hollywood's appeal.
As he exclaims, Hollywood is "the only place in the world where anyone
says, 'Santa Maria, it had slipped my mind.'"
For example, the Hollywood cartoon — a staple of Hollywood
production — embodies many of the formal techniques claimed to be
deconstructive. And yet, if any political concern can be attributed to
these cartoons, that is so only in the etymological sense of political: that
which deals with the polis, with the universal relations of people to each
other and to the world. To modify my initial comments, films
demonstrate not three attitudes but two. Films differ significantly not so
much in their degrees of formal complexity as in their political attitude,
their sense of the changing and changeable nature of the world. I would
suggest that what I initially described as a separate category of attitude
— namely, conscious and deliberate self-reflexivity — may be nothing
other than an expansion and making manifest of inherent qualities of
art.
This difference of attitude — between textual artifice (forced or not) and
social attitude — is the difference between art and political art. Let's take
a closer look at a Hollywood cartoon for an example. DUCK AMUCK
(t953) is a virtual culmination of the experimental possibilities of the
Hollywood cartoon. £6] The subject of the cartoon is the nature of
animation technique itself. In DUCK AMUCK, Daffy Duck undergoes
victimization at the hand of his animator, ultimately revealed to be none
other than Bugs Bunny. Bugs tortures Daffy by playing with such film
coordinates as framing, background, sound, and color. In an article on
DUCK AMUCK in Film Comment, Richard Thompson rightly notes that
the film manifests a high degree of emphasized formal complexity:
"The film is extremely conscious of itself as an act of cinema,
as is much of Jones' work ... DUCK AMUCK is a good
example of Noel Burch's dialectic idea of film elements:
foreground and background, space and action, character and
environment, image and soundtrack are all in conflict with
one another..."
Yet Burch's dialectic idea, as he himself notes, is far from political and so
is DUCK AMUCK. If DUCK AMUCK is a metaphor for the confusions of
life (as Thompson suggests), it is a disengaged metaphor at best, for it
fails to examine confusion through a politicized perspective. Indeed, the
source of Daffy Duck's angst reveals itself to be none of the agents of
social domination in the real world, but merely Bugs Bunny — another
fictive character, whose power is tautological in origin. The film opens
up a formal space and not a political one in viewer consciousness. DUCK
AMUCK closes in on itself, fiction leads to and springs from fiction, the
text becomes a loop which effaces social analysis. This is the project of
all nonpolitical art, realist or modernist.
We may approach this issue from another direction if we examine those
theories that deal with classical or traditional art's supposed function
vis-a-vis the daily workings of the material world. The recent critics
contend, as the earlier quote from Peter Wollen suggests, that bourgeois
art works to instill a complacency in the viewer, a complacency both
about the art object itself and about the world outside of art. But there is
nothing necessarily consoling or optimistic about conventional art.
Similarly , bourgeois life is not necessarily one of complacency and
isolation from an awareness of contradiction. It depends on what kind
of contradiction we're talking about. That our day-to-day expectations
can be thwarted is a normal and accepted possibility of everyday life.
The conventional work of art does not banish contradiction; rather, it
works by divorcing contradiction from it social causes. Bourgeois
existence is often little more than a continual succession of
disappointments, of subversions, all of which fissure our self unity and
social unity as acting subjects. Art doesn't deny this malaise; it merely
hides and denies its bases in historical forces. This is why contemporary
culture can accommodate formally subversive art.
As long as such an art does not connect its formal subversion to an
analysis of social situations, such art becomes little more than a further
example of the disturbances that go on as we live through a day. And a
work of art which defeats formal expectations does not lead to protest
against a culture that deals continually in the defeating of expectations.
This, I would suggest, explains much of the appeal of MARY
HARTMAN, MARY HARTMAN. It may also help to explain the morbid
underside of fan fascination with Hollywood — an underside of scandal
magazines and, ultimately, of the elevation of such trashy books as
Kenneth Anger's Hollywood Babylon into coffee table respectability. We
are used to having our realities deconstructed and so too it does not
bother us to see the reality of the movie screen world deconstructed. In
an article on MARY HARTMAN, MARY HARThAN in Socialist
Revolution (No. 30), Barbara Ehrenreich suggests that the TV series
represents the triumph of contradiction: a show which attacks the
consumer world is sponsored to sell the very sort of products its content
disdains. And it succeeds. Ehrenreich presents this plenitude of
contradictions as a stumbling block to socialist theories of popular
culture. If it were merely a question of art inspiring blind optimism,
criticism would be easy. Shows like MARY HARTMAN, MARY
HARTMAN have made pessimism, discontent, and irony marketable.
We need to deal with this realm of contradiction which obscures
political contradiction.
And here we return to Brecht. Brecht also sees a distance betwen art and
political art. Art automatically embodies a distancing, a making strange.
But there's nothing yet political about that. To be political, art has to be
made so. In his essay, "The Modern Theatre Is the Epic Theatre," Brecht
uses the example of opera to present his conception of art as possessing
intrinsic qualities of distance from reality to which the artist can add a
sense of political engagement. As is well known, Brecht's theory of art
reception emphasizes conscious knowledge over intuition. So does his
theory of art creation. Like his teacher, Erwin Piscator, Brecht sees art
as filling a. programmed function. This implies conscious attention to
form and to content.
This emphasis on conscious intention probably most separates Brecht
from the Hungarian Marxist critic Georg Lukacs. Lukacs' approach to
literary creation seems to fall quite often into an intuitionist theory of
creation:
"Lasting typologies based on a perspective of this sort [i.e.,
based on the "selection of the essential and the subtraction of
the inessential"] owe their effectiveness not to the artist's
understanding of day-to-day events but to his unconscious
possession of a perspective independent of and reaching
beyond his understanding of the contemporary scene"
C Realism in Our Time, my emphasis).
This belief on Lukacs' part in unconscious awareness leads Brecht to call
him a formalist, for it is precisely a belief like Lukacs' that the 19th
Century masters had the answers and that these answers are still
relevant to the 20th Century which signals a refusal to situate literary
production within the actual workings of history.
In fact, Brecht's aesthetic suggests that we need to expand and clarify
the notion of realism. Significantly, Brecht referred to his own artistic
project as a realism. Realism is no more (and no less) than a type of
attitude to the world and to art. Realism is not a natural quality; it is a
social quality. Brecht's theory most significantly distinguishes between
realism — which he saw as the overriding impulse of his art — and
unrealism, the setting up of false or limited or reified attitudes toward
the world and worldly possibilities. In "Against Gyorg Lukacs," he
defines realism as
"discovering the causal complexes of society/unmasking the
prevailing view of things as the view of those who rule it."
Realism, thus, is a form of knowledge, a picturing of reality. To judge the
efficacy of a particular realism,
"one must compare the depiction of life in a work with the
life that is being depicted."
Like the Lacanian theories of the subject which recent critics draw upon,
Brecht's theory depends on a notion of positioning, of the subject's place
in the circuit of communication. But Brecht diverges from these critics
in an essential way. For Brecht the attitudinal position of the viewing
subject springs from an attitudinal position in the work — the political
artwork embodies a difference between the way things are and the way
they can be. Brecht's formal experimentation depends on content in two
ways. First, form must change to reflect changing realities; otherwise,
the formalism of a Lukacs may result. Second, Brecht's political theatre
is a theatre of possibility — a theatre showing that life doesn't only have
to take on the forms it generally does. Political art compares an image of
human beings as "unalterable" to one of them as "alterable and able to
alter" (quoted from "The Modern Theatre Is the Epic Theatre"). As such,
the new theatre shows that formal arrangements of life can change. We
can do things we never thought possible. But the partial grounding in
Brecht of groups like the Living Theatre — groups which disconnect the
potentials of activism from its social(ist) responsibility — suggests that
qualifications need to be placed on the sorts of possibilities that a
Brechtian political art would encourage. Not all possibilities are equally
valid; Brecht chooses validity on the basis of a socialist perspective.
Hence, content once again makes its entrance. It is what the work says
about the real world that matters. The artist must pay close attention to
the world of possibility his/her work promises, jjzl
For Brecht, political art plays off a political redefinition of credulity and
skepticism. To avoid the new world of possibility appearing as nothing
but noise, the artwork must also make use of the old world as a
standard. Meaning, and its realization in action, comes from the
differences between the two world views. Political art defamiliarizes the
world. But it does so by playing off our connections to that world.
This reading of Brecht has two important implications for our
discussion. First of all, if the political text invites production from the
spectator, this production is a source of pleasure. Obviously, Brecht sees
the theatre as a site of learning, but that learning — that accession to
knowledge — brings and is immersed in pleasure. The spectator finds
joy in comparing a worldview which he or she now realizes is a
strangling one to a worldview of possibilities. Pleasure comes from
knowing the world can be remade. Pleasure, as Brecht says in Note 2 of
"A Short Organum for the Theatre" is "the noblest function that we have
found for the 'theatre.'" Or as he says later in the Organum, the
audience
"must be entertained with the wisdom that comes from the
solution of problems, with the anger that is a practical
expression of sympathy with the underdog, with the respect
due to those who respect humanity... in short, with whatever
delights those who are producing something " (my
emphasis).
Second, insofar as Brecht's political art includes the presence of the
familiar world and yet presents a more attractive world, Brechtian art is
an art of identification. In examining Brecht's theories, critics have too
often declared that the theories allow no place for identification. In fact,
Brecht's theory of art embodies two identifications: one empathetic and
unquestioning — the one connected to the reified vision of the world —
and a critical one — a new perspective of knowledge from which the old
way is scrutinized. In his essay on "Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting,"
Brecht is emphatic about the need for identification in political theatre:
"The audience identifies itself with the actor as being an
observer, and accordingly develops his attitude of observing
or looking on."
We need to carefully examine questions of art's relation to an audience
and to the production of pleasure. Pleasure and the importance of
artistic popularity come under attack in much of the new radical
criticism. I would suggest that we are witnessing the rise of a break or
gap between criticism and popular reception. This has several causes,
among them the growth of a new, difficult art which demands strenuous
audience participation. Recent criticism's emphasis on theory rather
than practice (as in Althusser's elevation of philosophizing into a sort of
practice), and the resulting romanticism of the intellectual, also
contributes to this new esthete-ism. Aesthetic theory seems to be falling
prey to a new elitism in which a select group of critics claim for
themselves an exclusive knowledge of the workings of literary
production. In his review of Charles Grivel's Pi'oduction de I'interet
romanesque (in Diacritics 6:1), Jean Alter calls this new totalitarian
approach "terrorist semiotics," and he pinpoints many of its strategies of
clique inclusion and popular exclusion: a scientistic mode of writing,
neologisms, haughtiness, and an obscure range of references. Obviously
a similar charge is being argued out in what we might call "the Screen
resignation debate," where several editors resigned from Screen because
of its intellectual elitism and subsequent disdain for the day-to-day
needs of Screen Education.
Paradoxically, although the new critics situate themselves in opposition
to humanist criticism, they invoke a division of taste parallel to the high
culture/ mass culture distinction so beloved in humanist criticism. From
Ortega y Gasset's dehumanization of art to Susan Sontag's erotics of art
to Roland Barthes' distinction between pleasure and bliss, there is little
change in the elitism of the critical endeavor. Recent critics see
themselves as possessing a heightened approach to literary appreciation
(an approach which Barthes and others refer to as the "freeing of the
signifier") while mass audiences supposedly stumble along in realist
naivete. At worst, this approach refuses history. It regards a certain
popular sort of viewing practice as debased, quotidian, and so it
dismisses that practice, refusing to examine its social dimensions: how
texts have been received, how they have mattered. When, for example,
Peter Wollen suggests in "Semiotics and Citizen Kane” that "it is now
possible to read there in the film an entirely different film, one which
Welles probably never intended," I believe that Wollen blurs the more
important issue: to analyze how the film has been read, to examine its
influence on audiences who don't see an entirely different KANE.
Terrorist esthetics feeds into and feeds from the precise sort of
formalism which turns Brecht's theory into a theory of work, which
downgrades realism, disdains identification, and condemns pleasure. In
fact, we need to pay a more open attention to degrees of identification
and pleasure.
At the very least, we can distinguish three possible forms of pleasure in a
work of art. There is the pleasure of familiarity. This is the pleasure of
uncritical, reified realism. Then there is pleasure which comes from art's
dehumanization or from forced self-reflexivity. This is the pleasure of
art as form, as aesthetic emotion, as Kant suggested. This is a pleasure
which, as Barthes contends in The Pleasure of the Text, derives its force
by shying away from history, by trying to be outside ideology (although
such an attempt is itself ideological). Then there is the pleasure
elaborated by Brecht, the pleasure of an art which finally realizes the
dream of the Roman poet Horace in his Ars Poetica (to which Brecht
continually refers): to please and instruct. To please through instruction.
To instruct through pleasure. An art whose content is a combination of
the world and a better version of the world.
We also need to examine instances of defamiliarization in popular art, in
a valuable article on audience response in Jump Cut, No. 4, Chuck
Kleinhans distinguishes between self-reflexive and self-critical films, the
latter being films which directly examine both their form and their
content. If, as I have claimed, all films embody a self-reflexivity, then we
need to go on to examine differing uses and degrees of self-criticism. Of
course, such self-criticism is not necessarily in itself political. We need
to go back to Brecht's notion of conscious political criticism, but we also
need to be more receptive to the possibility that such a critical mode
may be operative in films of the so-called "dominant cinema." This
whole realm of investigation seems a promising one. But only if we can
get beyond the dismissive attitude currently in fashion and move toward
a knowledge important not only because it is knowledge but also
because it matters.
Notes
u I originally presented this paper at a panel on self-reflexive films at
the annual conference of the Society for Cinema Studies in March, 1977.
I have modified it somewhat for publication.
Coming from Kant who saw practical reason and imagination as
distinct regions of the human mind, 19th Century Romanticism tended
to privilege the artwork as a special and superior activity of the creative
portion of the intellect. In contrast, a politically aware criticism places
an emphasis on seeing artworks as results of practical human activity
rather than a transcendent creative talent above and beyond social
responsibility. Thus, the use of terms like code and text to refer to
aspects of an artwork has a deliberate and polemical intent behind it.
Such usage stresses that artworks are constructions, that they are
objects produced by people and for people in particular social situations.
The text is the configuration of elements in a single work of art. Unlike
Romanticism's theory of Organicism which treats the artwork as a
unified (organic) whole, the notion of the text concentrates on the
individual elements and how they go together. For example, Cahiers du
cinema's famous analysis of YOUNG MR. LINCOLN extracts two
elements from the text — its attitudes toward sexuality and politics — to
examine how the film's ostensible unity actually conceals a set of
divergent and even contradictory impulses.
"Codes are rules of communication whose application
appears from text to text. Effective communication can only
occur when senders and receivers share knowledge of the
codes. The notion of the code is important in the
examination of artistic media since it raises questions about
the very extent to which we can consider an artistic text as an
act of communication, and about the extent to which
convention and rules govern the traditions and
transgressions in art production and reception."
( 32 )
3. The subject-object distinction has been one of the central concerns of
philosophy throughout its history. The distinction concerns human
beings (conscious subjects) and the possible ways in which they can
come to know about and perhaps understand the world around them.
Marx, for example, suggests that people can best live in the world not as
passive observers but as active participants. Those film critics who
attack film illusionism and its notion of film as a window on the world
generally direct their attack against two targets. First, they criticize the
passivity which illusionist film seems to force spectators into. Second,
they attack the impression which illusionist film seems to convey of a
world which one can understand simply by viewing it.
4^ Oudart and Baudry are two French critics who argue that the very
technology of filmmaking — for example, the lens used — reproduces
the ideological perspective of Western civilization. A useful introduction
to this argument is Baudry's essay "Ideological Effects of the Basic
Cinematographic Apparatus," Film Quarterly, 28:2 (Winter 1974-1975).
5. In his study of English literature, The Great Tradition, moralist
literary critic F.R. Leavis declared that the privilege of being part of the
great tradition belonged exclusively to Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry
James, and Joseph Conrad. Thus he excluded writers ranging from
Dickens whom he felt was too popular in appeal to James Joyce whose
experiments he believed represented a "dead end." Many of the literary
scholars who have criticized Leavis have done so simply to argue for the
writers he leaves out rather than to question the very notion of a great
tradition no matter who its members might be.
h. The screenplay for DUCK AMUCK has appeared in Richard
Thompson's article on the film in Film Comment, 11, No. 1 (January-
February, 1975), pp. 42-3.
%. Brecht's qualification here is an important one. In suggesting the need
to awaken people to new life possibilities, so many works of art fail to
distinguish adequately between valid and invalid experiences, and so
they promote an art which holds valuable aspects of human life in
contempt. For example, the cult of cruelty in art often glorifies the
violation of the human body. The ostensible suggestion is that this opens
up new artistic experiences: violence is a source of heightened aesthetic
pleasure. That such art (which ranges from A CLOCKWORK ORANGE
to The Story ofO to "punk rock") often singles out women as the target
of violence suggests one (and only one) of the dangers of such an
approach. For only one example (there are many!) of this defense of
violence as a source of higher consciousness, see Susan Sontag, "The
Pornographic Imagination," Styles of Radical Will (New York: Delta
Books, 1969). Sontag calls for an "erotics of art;" given the fascism this
can lead to, Brecht would not have favored such an art.
To top Current issue Archived essays Jump Cut home
JUMP CUT
A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY MEDIA
The political program of
Cahiers du cinema, 1969-1977
by William Guynn
from Jump Cut, no. 17, April 1978, pp. 32-35
copyright Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, 1978, 2005
The French journal, Cahiers du cinema, has had an enormous impact in
Marxist film criticism. Film scholars and cultural militants on the
American left have followed, with considerable awe, the development of
the Cahiers group's conception of the Marxist theory of culture and have
applied its critical methodology. Curiously, these same scholars and
militants have thus far not attempted to come to terms with Cahiers du
cinema in a specifically political fashion, that is, to question the
underlying political assumptions on which its theory is based and which
guide its work in practice. In France, discussion of Cahiers du cinema's
political program by the intellectual left has been vociferous, but often
marred by political or professional rivalry. JjQ Many of the central
questions concerning the political nature of Cahiers du cinema remain
to be raised: What has been the political history of the journal? What is
its program for culture? What are the political roots which have
determined the development of its cultural theory? What kind of
Marxism does Cahiers du cinema in fact represent?
The political history of the Cahiers group describes the long march it
made from the elitist intellectualism of the New Wave to the crude
ideology and class-determinism of Socialist Realism. In its Marxist
period Cahiers du cinema has been torn between two contradictory
forces. (1) It received as its heritage the formalist tendencies of New
Wave intellectualism, which became a "politics” of form, grounded in
the avant-gardist theory of the early Soviet filmmakers. (2) It looked for
political leadership to the French Communist Party, then to Maoism,
and ultimately had to embrace Socialist Realism and contend with the
hostility of that doctrine to formal concerns in art, for Socialist Realism
is the cultural doctrine common to both Maoism and old line Stalinist
parties.
The political transformation of Cahiers du cinema was an extended
process during which the Cahiers group struggled to maintain a
contradictory fusion between its formalist impulses and the cultural
policies prescribed by the "party." At no point in its history has Cahiers
du cinema been able to resolve definitively its contradictions. What
appears on the surface as political movement is in fact vacillation, and, if
one compares the review's "Marxist” period in the late Sixties with its
most recent issues, one would be tempted to say that Cahiers du cinema
has come full circle. It is nonetheless of great interest to Marxists to
follow Cahiers du cinema's political development through its two major
phases: first, the period of its orientation toward the French Communist
Party (late 1969-late 1971); second, the period of its consolidation as a
Maoist grouping (late 1971-present). [2] In the following paragraphs I
will attempt to characterize the major features of these two phases and
discuss the political theories which sustain them.
The critics of Cahiers du cinema, like most left-leaning French
intellectuals, were taken unawares by the massive revolutionary upsurge
of May-June 1968. The revolutionary fervor of the French working class
infused filmmakers, actors, technicians and students of cinema with
rebellious enthusiasm. The Cahiers group gives an excellent account in
its August 1968 issue (No. 203), "Estates General of Cinema." With the
dissolution of the May-June movement, which had been effected by
July, Cahiers du cinema turned for political leadership to the French
Communist Party (PCF). From this point forward, the Cahiers group's
Marxism was characterized by its uncritical — albeit passive —
acceptance of the political line of the party. Despite the fresh betrayals
carried out by the PCF during the events of May-June 1968 — it called in
fact for the striking French working class to return to work — Cahiers du
cinema remained oblivious to the lessons of history. It is difficult to
believe that these critics, who, as activists during the May-June events,
were themselves betrayed by the PCF, could acknowledge in retrospect:
"...the PCF appeared to us, at that point, after the
decomposition of the May 68 movement, as the only force
which had a coherent strategy in opposition to the
bourgeoisie." (No. 234-235, December 1971-
January/February 1972)
Such a statement reflects the political consciousness of Cahiers du
cinema in this period: the overriding concerns of these critics were
extraordinarily parochial. Their interest in Marxism was largely limited
to its application as a critical methodology to literature and art. There is
doubtless some truth to the allegation made by Cinethique that it was
the appearance of Cinethique in January 1969 as a "Marxist-Leninist"
journal that forced Cahiers du cinema into what Cinethique called the
"red turn." ( Cinethique 6, January-February 1970) Whether it was
motivated by rivalry with Cinethique or by the "need for a clear
theoretical base to which to relate [its] practice," Cahiers du cinema, in
October and November 1969 ( CduC 216 and 217) put forward for the
first time the general lines of its political program. Significantly, in the
famous articles entitled "Cinema! Ideology/Criticism," [3] the Cahiers
group takes no political position at all with regard to the French left —
its political program is limited to the sphere of "ideological" struggle as
applied to film theory. As it admitted in retrospect, Cahiers du cinema
quite simply endorsed the French Communist Party's political line in
order to be done with the question of political struggle:
“The intervention of Marxism-Leninism in the journal...
implied not only the adoption of historical and dialectical
materialism in the specific work of Cahiers (elaboration of a
materialist theory of cinema, ideological struggle in the field
of cinema) but, posing the question of the articulation of this
work with the political struggles in progress, demanded an
analysis of these struggles. This analysis was not produced.
Or rather, it was put off, in the name of an erroneous
conception of the priority given to ideological struggle in its
relative autonomy in relation to political struggle... ["Politics
and ideological class struggle," CduC 234-234, December
1971-January/February 1972].
In brief, the political program of Cahiers du cinema during its early
"Marxist" phase (late 1969-late 197I) has two aspects. (1) In order to
liquidate the question of political struggle, it embraced uncritically the
political line of the French Communist Party. (2) It concentrated its
energies on "ideological struggle," that is, it put forward a theory of
"politicized" formalism, which was grafted onto the PCF's political line.
The Cahiers group's critical methodology in this period can best be
understood by examining one of its major political documents. The
classic expression of Cahiers du cinema's cultural politics is to be found
in its collective analysis of Jean Renoir's film, LA VIE EST A NOUS
(CduC 218, March 1970). LA VIE EST A NOUS was made at the behest
of the French Communist Party for the electoral campaign of May 1936.
In the period of rising fascism, the PCF espoused the strategy of the
Popular Front. Abandoning the communist stand of class against class,
it advocated political "unity" between the parties of the working class
and the "liberal" wing of the French bourgeoisie for a frontal attack
against fascism. LA VIE EST A NOUS is a piece of Popular Front
propaganda in which Renoir exploits several cinematic genres: a
documentary sequence describing the riches of France; fictionalized
scenes of the conversion of workers, petty bourgeois and small farmers
to the PCF program; the in-studio filming of a PCF politician's speech. It
was the intention of the Cahiers group to rehabilitate this neglected film
and propose it to militant filmmakers as a landmark in revolutionary
filmaking. More important, it was a significant political gesture: the
Cahiers group asserted its political endorsement of the PCF by
embracing that party's political history.
The article, "LA VIE EST A NOUS, Militant Film," follows the format
developed by the Cahiers group,a format which reflects the two aspects
— political dogmatism and formalist analysis — which characterize its
critical methodology.
(1) The first part of the article purports to describe the film’s "situation,"
i.e., its historical-social-political-economic context. In point of fact, the
Cahiers group gives us no concrete analysis of the political situation in
France in 1936, but simply reiterates Bulgarian party leader Georgi
Dimitrov's position — the position held by all Communist Parties under
Stalin:
"At the present hour the working masses may no longer
choose between bourgeois democracy and the dictatorship of
the proletariat but only between democracy and fascism."
This bow to Dimitrov constitutes the Cahiers group's endorsement of
the strategy of the Popular Front. In their collective political analysis,
the Cahiers critics thus forego a discussion of the still crucial questions
posed by Renoir's film: What is the class nature of the Popular Front?
Whose class interest does such a front represent? Instead, the Cahiers
group dogmatically affirm that LA VIE EST A NOUS is the cultural
reflection of a correct political line.
(2) The second part of the article is an analysis of the formal structure of
the film in the context of the identified "situation." Through their
analysis, the Cahiers critics seek to establish Renoir in the lineage of
revolutionary filmmakers (Eisenstein, Vertov, Godard, Straub) who
attack bourgeois ideology by criticizing and subverting the "codes" by
which it is communicated. According to the Cahiers group's reading of
the text, in LA VIE EST A NOUS Renoir "deconstructs" the bourgeois
documentary through an original interplay between "acted" and "non-
acted" sequences. A strategic "gliding" between documentary and
fictional elements disrupts the normal ideological discourse associated
with bourgeois documentary, and the viewers undergoing these
"displacements" are thereby incited to question the entire bourgeois
outlook on the world. The assumption on the part of the Cahiers critics
is that the working class and petty bourgeois audiences to which the film
is addressed are to be educated, not so much by the "revolutionary"
content of the film, as by its revolutionary technique.
"LA VIE EST A NOUS, Militant Film" is what Cahiers du cinema
counterposes to fragmented bourgeois criticism. It sees this article as an
example of a historically specific, dialectical understanding of the
functioning of art in political life. Unfortunately, whatever cohesiveness
there is in this reading of Renoir's film is due to the Cahiers group's
dogmatism rather than to its understanding of events in the world. The
only political analysis these critics offer is that LA VIE EST A NOUS,
commissioned by the French Communist Party, reflects a political line
of that party and that the films’ structure resembles, point for point, PCF
Secretary-General Maurice Thorez’s speech at the 8th Party Congress
(January 1936). This is hardly surprising. What is striking, and
characteristic, about this article is that the formal considerations —
despite the attempt to politicize them — obscure and circumvent the
central political questions posed by the film itself. Ironically, the Cahiers
group was to repudiate this article and the Popular Front strategy,
demolishing its own intellectual house of cards, in the criticism/self¬
criticism that inaugurated its transformation into a Maoist collective. In
a peculiar telegraphic style, the Cahiers critics assail their past:
"Therefore, rapprochement with the PCF, the culmination of
which is marked by a collective analysis of LA VIE EST A
NOUS (CduC 218), repeating word for word in non-critical
fashion, the thesis of the film (the theses of the PCF on the
period of the Popular Front and, today, on the Popular
Front)" (CduC 234-235, December 1971-January/February
1972, p. 6)
The irony is double, for the Cahiers group is apparently oblivious to the
fact that Maoism embraces and defends the history of the Popular
Front. [4I
By its own admission, the Cahiers group was only able to maintain its
orientation toward the French Communist Party by embracing that
party politically while rejecting its policies on culture. By effecting such
a separation between political line and cultural line, the Cahiers critics
were able to continue to pursue their formalist theory in a relatively
independent fashion. What they had developed since the experiences of
May 1968 was a thoroughly undialectical and unmarxist conception of
form in art, which asserted that technique in and of itself is political.
According to their theory, the signifying practices, in this case the
historically developed technique of filmmaking, largely determine the
ideology embodied in a given work of art. Bourgeois form necessarily
refers to bourgeois class content. Therefore, as a first priority, a
revolutionary film must expose the workings of its own technique, since
this technique is ideological by its very nature. If we accept this
argument, it follows that the study of form is not a way of avoiding
discussion of political content, but, on the contrary, plunges to the heart
of it.
The Cahiers groups formalism culminated in a series of articles by Jean
Louis Comolli, entitled "Technique and Ideology, (CduC 229, 230, 231,
233, 234 - 235 ) May 1971-February 1972), which sought to lay the
theoretical and historical basis for the politics" of form. At bottom, these
articles asserted that the photographic apparatus and associated
cinematographic processes, seen in their totality as technique, are
simple ideological products of the development of bourgeois art since
the early Italian Renaissance:
“It is to the reciprocal redoubling of the ideological demand
(to see life as it is) and the economic demand (to make
profits from it) that cinema owes its existence." (CduC 229,
May-June 1971, p. 15)
This reductionist view of cultural history leads logically to its
conclusion: Brought into being by the ideological and economic
demands of the bourgeoisie, film technique, in the very process by which
it reproduces an image of the world, inescapably reproduces the
bourgeois world outlook. It is clear that, conceived in this fashion, a
Marxist understanding of art demands formal analysis above all else, for
technique is at the very root of ideology. This is not, as I will attempt to
demonstrate, a Marxist conception.
As I have suggested, Cahiers du cinema represents an anomaly, insofar
as its preoccupation with aesthetic theory and formal analysis coexisted
— if not peacefully — with the political dogmatism and cultural class-
determinism which characterize Socialist Realism. If the relationship
that the Cahiers critics discerned between revolutionary form and
revolutionary content is not Socialist Realist, neither is it authentic
Marxism. Rather, it represents a third current, which emerged most
forcefully in the avant-gardist movement in the Soviet Union after the
revolution. This tendency found its main organizational form in the
Proletkult and its principal theoretician in A.A. Bogdanov, long-time
political adversary of Lenin. £5] Although the Proletkult itself dissolved
in the early '20s, the essential tenets, largely all the iconoclast
tendencies, continued to exert considerable influence over the Soviet
avant-gardes, and, in certain aspects, had an impact on the formulation
of the doctrine of Socialist Realism.
The avant-gardists in Russian art had maintained, even prior to the
revolution, an extreme hostility to tradition. From their petty-bourgeois,
bohemian and anarchistic perspective, these avant-gardists declared
war on Western culture and, at their most extreme, advocated the
indiscriminate destruction of the consecrated arts, which gave, they
asserted, a passive, mausoleum-like reflection of the bourgeois world.
To a limited extent, the avant-gardists incorporated elements of a social
program for culture into their own perspective and greeted the
revolution as an attack against the illegitimate hegemony of the ruling
classes in artistic matters. Primarily, however, these artists and
intellectuals proclaimed solidarity with the October Revolution for other
reasons. The antagonism they felt toward landowners and the
bourgeoisie was based not on larger social grounds, but on the
persecution of their artistic movement. They had not yet obtained — as
avant-gardists in the past and their counterparts in Europe would in the
future — admission to the sanctity of bourgeois culture.
It was, more or less, an historic accident that artistic revolt and social
revolution coincided. Unaware of the dialectical movement which
characterizes both social and cultural change, the avant-gardists saw the
Russian Revolution as the total destruction of the past, in its social and
cultural dimensions. The left theorists, Bukharin among them, asserted
that bourgeois culture, like the bourgeois state, had to be smashed. The
historical coincidence, which seemed to unite art and revolution,
became the theoretical basis for the Proletkult’s conception that
revolution in artistic technique is part and parcel of social revolution.
Constructivist artist Vladimir Evgrafovich Tatlin, with overwhelming
pride, stated:
“The events of 1917 in the social field were already brought
about in our art in 1914....” f 61
What asserts itself in the Proletkult conception and reemerges once
again in the early 1970s in the cultural theory of Cahiers du cinema is
the impulse on the part of artists and intellectuals who have been won to
Marxism to designate their own sphere of activity as a primary arena for
class struggle. This necessarily involves a distortion of Marxist theory,
and resulted, in the case of the Proletkult, in a new theory of ideological
struggle — the notion of the “cultural front." In his preface to The
Peasant War in Germany, Engels, describing the German situation in
1874, clearly points out the importance of ideological struggle:
“For the first time since a workers’ movement has existed,
the struggle is being waged pursuant to its three sides — the
theoretical, the political and the economical-practical
(resistance to the capitalists) — in harmony and in its
interconnections, and in a systematic way. It is precisely in
this, as it were concentric, attack that the strength and
invincibility of the German movement lies. ӣ7!
Lenin later used Engels’ formulation concerning the central importance
of ideological struggle to attack economism in What Is To Be Done? £81
He asserted that without revolutionary theory there can be no
revolution, i.e., that the working class could not attain socialist
consciousness and undertake its revolutionary tasks without the
intervention of the vanguard party, armed with proletarian ideology. To
Marxists, ideological struggle is the struggle to develop the revolutionary
tool of scientific socialism. Much to Lenin's dismay, the Proletkult
redefined ideological struggle to mean the "struggle" to develop
proletarian class culture. Hence art became an arm in the class struggle,
and the Proletkult was able to proclaim in one of its manifestoes:
“Art is a social product, conditioned by the social
environment. It is also a means of organizing labour ... The
Proletariat must have its own class art in order to organize
its forces in the struggle for socialism...” [9]
Lenin polemicized consistently and hotly against the Proletkult’s
political deviations. Although he had no personal taste for the work of
the left artists, Lenin did not question the Proletkult members’ or any
left artists’ right to freedom of expression within the cultural field. He
attacked the Proletkult ideologically because it had elaborated a theory
of ideological struggle which supported its bid for autonomy as an
organizational force separate from the Soviet state's Commissariat of
Education. The Proletkult sought to dictate in cultural matters for the
Soviet state, to be recognized as an autonomous political organization
and to implement a proletarianization of the Soviet arts. All of its aims
were in direct contradiction with the policies of the Soviet state. Lenin
held that there was no cultural road to socialism and that all artists,
including the traditionalist fellow-travelers, were to receive equal
treatment. He intervened consistently on the behalf of the old
institutions of bourgeois culture — the Bolshoi, the Moscow Art Theatre
— in order to protect them against the assaults of the “left" artists, fiol
There was to be no cultural dictatorship under Lenin.
It is difficult to assess in specific terms the influence the Soviet avant-
garde exerted on the Cahiers' political formalism. The Cahiers group
undertook a lengthy study of avant-garde theory, particularly in
numbers 220-221 (June 1970), devoted to Russia in the '20s, and
numbers 226-227 (January-February 1971), devoted to Eisenstein.
Faced with the incredible heterogeneity of the avant-garde camps in the
Soviet Union in the ‘20s, Cahiers prefers not to take sides, nor does it
analyze the decisive impact that Stalin's bureaucratic regime had on
Soviet filmmakers and avant-garde theory in the subsequent period.
What the Cahiers group does assert is that the early Soviet texts are "our
immediate past" and also “our present," (220-221: “Editorial”) that is,
that the Soviet avant-garde theory is the point of departure for the
Cahiers' own conception of the cultural vanguard. The texts drawn from
the ‘20s — the most important being Eisenstein's “On the Question of a
Materialist Approach to Form” — reflect the ideas of the “left” avant-
garde and center on the question of revolutionary ideology and
revolutionary form. In his essay, Eisenstein designates STRIKE as an
“ideological victory in the area of form." (CduC 220-221, p. 33, italics in
original) In the same issue Bernard Eisenschitz, in an article entitled
"The Proletkult, Eisenstein," attempts to dissociate Eisenstein from the
Proletkult camp, where he in fact did his early work. What Eisenschitz
ignores is that the organizational death of the Proletkult in the early ‘20s
did not bring about the demise of the Proletkult theory of "ideological'
struggle in the arts. Early Soviet film theory is infused with this
conception. And, clearly, it is to the Soviet avant-garde that the Cahiers
group looks for political direction. In their programmatic statement,
“Cinema/Ideology/Criticism" ( CduC 216), the Cahiers critics assert:
“To us the only possible line of advance seems to be to use
the theoretical writing of the Russian filmmakers of the
twenties (Eisenstein above all) to elaborate and apply a
critical theory of cinema, a specific method of apprehending
rigorously defined objects, in direct reference to the method
of dialectical materialism.” fill
In essence, the Cahiers theoreticians embrace the Proletkult corruption
of the Marxist conception of ideological struggle. Like the Proletkultists,
they believe that they can participate in the revolutionary
transformation of society in their capacity as cultural critics. They
subscribe to the idealist notion that they can awaken revolutionary
consciousness in the working class and arm it ideologically by exposing
the treachery of bourgeois form and by proposing new formal models
which constitute the basis of proletarian culture. Through this critical
exposure of certain facets of the capitalist superstructure, the Cahiers
group believes it can undermine the whole foundation of bourgeois
society.
It is, in fact, the purest idealism to suggest that the proletariat is
capable, under the conditions of capitalist rule, of creating its own
autonomous culture. Such a conception denies the historical conditions
in which the proletariat has developed as a class. The bourgeoisie
emerged as a class within feudal society, consolidated its economic
power and developed a class culture of extraordinary richness before it
actually seized state power. In contrast, the proletariat, possessing
nothing, exploited and oppressed, systematically denied education and
access to cultural life in general, must seize state power as a
precondition to its cultural development. If one analyzes the experience
of the early Soviet state, it is clear that the revolutionary programs of
education and cultural development for the working masses, conceived,
even as they were, under conditions of crisis and poverty, are
unthinkable under capitalism.
During the period of its orientation toward the PCF, the Cahiers group,
whose interest in Marxism was primarily academic, avoided facing
political realities — this would have jeopardized the Cahiers theoretical
enterprise and exposed the emptiness of its formal games. In its Maoist
phase, as I will indicate, Cahiers du cinema came to reject much of its
aestheticism and severed, if too hastily, its ties with intellectual avant-
gardism. It did so in order to conform to cultural Maoism, i.e., to the
doctrines of Socialist Realism. The Cahiers critics did not, however,
abandon the avant-garde's "cultural front" conception. For the
Proletkult's "cultural front" with its notion of "proletarian culture,"
survived the onslaught of Stalinism, and, in fact, as Camilla Gray points
out, became one of the fundamental tenets of Socialist Realism, f 12I But,
whereas the Proletkult demanded organizational autonomy for the
"cultural road to socialism,” the Socialist Realists demanded that all
cultural work be done at the dictates of the Party and reflect the Party
line.
If the Cahiers group's early Marxism is complex and contradictory, its
Maoist theory is consistent in all its aspects. The whole of Cahiers du
Cinema's Maoist program for culture can be found in Mao's "Talks at
Yenan Forum on Literature and Art," 1942, the key text to which
Cahiers articles continually refer, fml Significantly, Mao's formulations
were a response to criticisms of elitism and sexism which had been
raised by party members, most notably woman writer Ting Ling, against
the party bureaucracy at Yenan. In a piece entitled "Thoughts on March
8," Ting Ling expressed her profound disillusionment at the fate of
women at Yenan, who were, presumably, emancipated. [14] In his
"Talks at Yenan Forum,” Mao intended to "rectify" critical party
elements by stifling freedom of criticism and laying down the theoretical
basis for his policy of artistic repression in the tradition of Socialist
Realism. It is this program that Cahiers du cinema adopts beginning
with issue 234-235 (December 1971—January/February 1972). I will
discuss the elements of this program to show how it deviates from
Marxism.
The basic tenet of the Maoist conception of culture is that a work of art
is the exclusive possession of one class or another. To quote Mao:
"In the world today all culture, all literature and art belong to
definite classes and are geared to definite political lines"
(Mao, p. 25).
That is, art is either "proletarian" or it is "bourgeois." Mao's assumption
is that art is, and is nothing more than, class ideology, defined in its
narrowest sense, and that ideology is always directly determined by its
relation to the material base of society. Certainly Marx is clear in his
assertion that art and intellectual life in general are part of the
superstructure of society and constitute one of the arenas in which the
ideologies of the contending classes are elaborated and in which class
contradictions are clarified and fought out. Marxists hold that art does
not function independently of the material base of society but is
decisively affected by it. It is, in fact, the task of the Marxist critic to
explain the historic demands which call works of art into being and
which provoke revolution in artistic form. However, Marx and Engels
defined the relationship between material base and superstructure in
the following way:
"Political, juridical, philosophical, religious, literary, artistic,
etc. development is based on economic development. But all
these react upon one another and also upon the economic
base. It is not that the economic situation is cause, solely
active, while everything else is only passive effect. There is,
rather, interaction on the basis of economic necessity, which
asserts itself [emphasis in the original]." fi^l
Marx not only insists on the historical complexity which generates
culture but also asserts that there is a dimension to art which cannot be
fully explained by reference to historical development and existing
relations of production:
"It is well known that certain periods of highest development of art
stand in no direct connection with the general development of society,
nor with the material basis and the skeleton structure of its
organization." fi61
The determination of the class stand of individual artists and writers, or
the class values embodied in their works, poses very complex problems.
As Engels points out, in the work of Goethe there is considerable
ambivalence. And in Balzac there is absolute contradiction between the
avowed class stand of the artist — royalist and Catholic — and the image
he actually gives us of that dying class:
"Well, Balzac was politically a Legitimist; his great work as a
constant elegy on the irretrievable decay of good society; his
sympathies are all with the class doomed to extinction. But
for all that his satire is never keener, his irony never bitterer
than when he sets in motion the very men and women with
whom he sympathizes most deeply — the nobles, f 17I
The rest of the Maoist program flows from its mechanical conception of
art as simple ideology. Art is conceived as only utilitarian and class-
serving, in the most immediate sense, and becomes irretrievably
confused with propaganda:
"A thing is good only when it brings real benefit to the
masses of the people" (Mao, p. 24).
The political task of the artist is to "serve the people, give them fuel in
snowy weather," through the propagation of utopian cheerfulness — not
exposing the dark, but "extolling" the "light." Above all, art must be
produced under the dictate of the party and "geared" to the party line.
(Continued on next page )
To top Current issue Archived essays Jump Cut home
JUMP CUT
A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY MEDIA
The political program of Cahiers du cinema, 1969-1977
(continued from page one!
from Jump Cut, no. 17, April 1978, pp. 32-35
copyright Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, 1978, 2005
Mao justifies his policy on culture through a distorted reading of Lenin's
1905 article, "Party Organization and Party Literature, in which Lenin
argues that all literature printed by the party must reflect the party line.
As Vyacheslav Polonsky, founder and editor of Bolshevik journal Press
and Revolution, indicates in his analysis of the period, Lenin wrote this
article at the point at which the Bolshevik Party had just emerged from
the underground. fi 81 Until 1905, all legal communist activity had been
non-party, and it was Lenin's task to struggle against non-partyism in
this new period and to forge the literary instruments of legal struggle.
Lenin is not discussing, as Mao would have it, literature as a general
cultural phenomenon — this was not an arena in which the Leninist
party intervened, either before or after the revolution. He refers rather
to the specifically ideological writing within the revolutionary party,
organized according to the principles of democratic centralism:
"...we are discussing party literature and its subordination to
party control. Everyone is free to write and say whatever he
likes, without restriction. But every voluntary association
(including the party) is also free to expel members who use
the name of the party to advocate anti-party views." fiol
Mao therefore asserts, on the supposed authority of Lenin, that art and
literature must become "cogs and wheels" in the revolutionary machine
or perish in the quagmire of bourgeois ideology. All "revolutionary"
artists and writers are to create under party scrutiny, and all that they
produce must reflect the party line.
The Socialist-Realist dogma of subordination of the arts to party control,
propounded by Stalin and adopted by Mao, is in direct opposition to the
Bolshevik policy, explicit in Lenin's work before the revolution and
adopted by the Soviet state after October. Artists and writers were to
enjoy complete freedom of expression, provided their work was not
specifically counterrevolutionary. As Sheila Fitzpatrick points out in The
Commissariat of Enlightenment, Anatol V. Lunacharsky, as head of
Narkompros (The Commissariat of Education) in the first twelve years
of the Soviet state, carried out the policy of free creative development in
science and art. There was no official "socialist" art, no preference
indicated by the state for any artistic grouping, despite the attempts of
the Proletkult avant-gardists to achieve artistic monopoly and be
recognized as the cultural arm of the revolution. In his preface to the
futurist Rzhanoe slovo (1918), published by the state, Lunacharsky
asserted:
"And of course the state must make it a rule to give the mass
reader access to all that is new and fresh. It is better to make
a mistake and offer the people something which is not now
capable of arousing their sympathy than to leave a work
which is rich with future possibilities hidden, because it is
not to — somebody's taste. Let the worker hear and evaluate
everything, the old and the new. We will not impose anything
on him; we will show him everything." f2ol
What is "original" in Mao's conception of "cultural work," although
implicit in Socialist Realist doctrine, is his theory of the "mass line." The
"cultural workers," like their political counterparts, must "go among the
people." According to the "mass line," knowledge, be it political or
cultural, is not derived from the Marxist study of the dialectics of
history, or from the application of scientific socialism to concrete reality,
or from the political work of the revolutionary, as Lenin described it in
What Is To Be Done?
For Mao, knowledge is "knowledge of the people," in the narrowest
sense. "Cultural workers" must remold and proletarianize themselves,
but not in the Leninist sense of revolutionaries steeled in proletarian
ideology; rather, Mao admonishes party members to "merge" with the
masses. At Yenan Mao asserts what is undeniably true — that
intellectuals have been contaminated by their bourgeois education and
by their petty bourgeois class origins. But in this historical context, as in
others, Mao used the charge of "class deviation" to bludgeon his political
opposition: impulses to criticize party policy can be traced to party
members' failure to remold themselves. Mao incites writers and artists
to relearn language, because they do not know the "rich, lively language"
of what Mao calls the "clean people." They must study peasant songs
and folk-tales, read wall-newspapers, as models of "proletarian" art.
And they must reject as ’poisonous" the content of bourgeois art, art
from the past, "foreign" art, which has value only in its technique.
During the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China, extremely
repressive measures were taken against any manifestation of culture
which might be hostile to Maoist thought: Beethoven and Bach were
banned as "bourgeois revisionists," and Goethe and Shakespeare as
"royalists." Under the guise of struggle against petty-bourgeois class
deviations, Mao's dicta on art and literature, from Yenan to the Cultural
Revolution, sought to suppress freedom of expression in all areas of
cultural work and thereby suppress the ideological basis for any currents
in opposition to the ruling bureaucracy.
The actual implementation of the Maoist program was bound to create
crises in the Cahiers organization. In all fairness to the Cahiers group,
its movement toward Maoism was, on a subjective level, a leftward
movement. Many of the criticisms it raised concerning the French
Communist Party were correct, if late in coming, and were grounded in
the conviction that the party had "lost" all revolutionary potential.
However, the major problem created by the Cahiers group's new-found
leftism was not political in character. The French Communist Party, in
response to the traditionally intellectual French "left" milieu, has at
times been rather tolerant of intellectual formalism, as long as
theorizing remained formal and never put into question the political
program of the Party. f2il In the case of Cahiers du Cinema, it would
doubtless have preferred to cajole that group into remaining within the
party orbit, and, in fact, made attempts in that direction.
For its part, Cahiers du cinema was heavily laden with intellectualism. It
had emerged from the self-consciously intellectual New Wave and had
assumed the banner of the Soviet cinematic avant-garde. On the one
hand, conversion to Maoism resulted in the Cahiers group's blind
adherence to the fluctuations of the Chinese Communist political line —
this constituted a simple transference of loyalty from one bureaucracy to
another and was easily accomplished. Cahiers du cinema immediately
assimilated China's position on the "social imperialist" USSR
revisionism" and "capitalist restoration" — and used it as a political arm
in its attacks against the PCF cultural organ, La Nouvelle Critique. On
the other hand, on the "cultural front," the Cahiers group was
confronted with Mao's "mass line" policy and its concomitant hostility to
intellectual formalism.
Cahiers du cinema continued for some months to balance between
formalism and the crude determinism of the "mass line" — producing in
the process a number of issues of review filled with incongruity. In issue
236-237 (March-April 1972) for example, Cahiers du cinema reprints an
article from Chinese Literature, an official Chinese publication,
describing THE RED DETACHMENT OF WOMEN as "a striking victory
of the revolutionary proletarian line of Chairman Mao in literary and
artistic matters." (p. 81) The analysis presented clearly falls into the
most simplistic tradition of Socialist Realism: all aspects of culture are
"class determined." Hence, THE RED DETACHMENT OF WOMEN is
judged solely on its merits as an embodiment of Mao's "proletarian"
line. In the same issue, we find Cahiers criticism of a highly
sophisticated character: Pascal Bonitzer's and Serge Daney's analysis of
"continuity" and "transparence" in Bazin's conception of cinema; and a
study of Bresson's FOUR NIGHTS OF A DREAMER, revealing the
"fictional and historic contradictions of the New Wave."
Resolution of this conflict came with an agonizing criticism/self¬
criticism, in which the Cahiers critics acknowledged their intellectual
elitism, their individualistic aspirations and their self-serving leanings —
in short, their "revisionism." They confessed their divorce from reality,
their lack of knowledge of the people. They were, as Mao says, like fish
out of water — and admitted the
"unreadability of Cahiers, not only for the masses, but for the
cadre militants as well. Thenceforth their goal was to
liquidate definitively the former objective which was to
cultivate the art of film criticism for the profit of the French,
and even international, intellectual tribe." (CduC 242-243,
November/December 1972-January 1973, p. 6)
Although the Cahiers critics capitulation to Maoist-style cultural action
was in certain respects regrettable, many of the criticisms they leveled
against their own functioning in the past were entirely correct. They
took to task their former aestheticism and their neglect of political
content:
"Placing the equal sign between aesthetic criterium and
political criticism. Saying: every lack on the formal level
necessarily refers to a lack on the political level and, under
the pretext of recalling to those who forget too easily the
non-neutrality of forms, neglecting to carry out a closer
examination of the context with which these forms were
laden, forgetting to specify this content in political terms,
leaving this task to others." (CduC 248, undated, p. 39)
Further, the Cahiers critics abjured the entire theoretical basis for their
formalist approach, and decried the excesses in which they had indulged
in their efforts to describe how" bourgeois art imposes its vision of the
world:
"...we have long had the tendency to look for this how where
no one, except a mystical ultraleftist, would look for it: in the
appareil de base [the camera and attendant technical
processes], or in the structure of all fiction, or in the
configuration of the movie theatre and the seating it
determines." (CduC 248, p. 40)
Having made the leap to full-blown Maoism, the Cahiers group was
confronted with the practical and theoretical problems of implementing
the mass line. The essential dilemma was this — how to carry out the
mass line" and merge with the masses as a small group of intellectuals
isolated from the proletariat. They couldn't "go home to the masses,"
that is, undertake mass work, without abandoning "theory," in the form
of the journal, and the masses were obviously not coming to them.
Thus, the Cahiers critics developed a strategy for cultural work which
would allow them to maintain close contact with the masses without
abandoning their theoretical tasks.
The key to the functioning of their strategy was what the Cahiers group
called the "elements relais ," which can best be rendered in English as
"relay runners." ( CduC 242-243) These relay runners, who would be
"cultural militants," were to "go to the masses," work among them,
gather raw material, and run back to the Cahiers. The Cahiers group
would take this raw material from the masses, raise it to a higher level
(as Mao would say), and the relay runners, armed with this new
theoretical distillation, would return to the masses in the schools and
cineclubs and use Cahiers theory to carry out correct cultural work. This
conception of the revolutionary as dismembered — the Cahiers group
functioning as the head separated from the body, the militants — was
not destined to cull favor with potential militant conscripts. Moreover,
the Cahiers group's attempted "mass" intervention in the class struggle
reveals the weakness of the "cultural front" strategy: "Cultural militants"
could intersect the proletariat only in peripheral ways — in high schools,
film clubs, and foyers — and not at the strategic heart of the organized
working class, the trade union movement, where the question of
revolutionary leadership is posed in the most urgent fashion. f22l
The second dilemma posed by the Cahiers group's adoption of the
Maoist program was its obligatory subservience to the political direction
of the vanguard party. As the Cahiers group affirms in its program:
"...there is no cultural line outside of a political line; the
cultural line is the application, on a specific front, of the
general political line." ( CduC 242243, November/December
1972-January 1973, p. 8)
And yet no vanguard Marxist party could be singled out from among the
myriad of Maoist groupings in France. The dilemma — how do you serve
the party when there is no party? — called for further theorizing. The
resolution was found in the following formulation:
"Aware of the problem, but considering that no organization
has emerged on the national level in the service of which we
can place ourselves, we have adopted the attitude which we
think most correct: it consists in defining ourselves as an
embryo of the general political line capable of guiding our
practice." ( CduC 242-243, p. 8)
Thus, armed with Mao's mass line and containing the embryo of the
vanguard party, the Cahiers group was ready to do ideological battle.
The battle lines are those drawn by Mao: there is bourgeois culture on
one side and proletarian culture on the other. The task of Cahiers du
cinema is twofold: (1) expose and destroy bourgeois culture, (2) uncover
and nurture the culture of the proletariat. Unfortunately for the
proletariat, the culture which can be identified as "proletarian," or even
"progressive," is limited to a few "vanguard" elements (most notably,
Godard and Straub), "progressive" films from national liberation
struggles, and the work of a few militant propagandists. The only
vestiges of mass culture the Cahiers group discerns are those of the
oppressed nationals of Britanny, Corsica, Pays Basque and Occitanie,
who give us the "most living forms of peoples' culture." In vain, the
Cahiers critics search for the roots of mass culture in the working class
in order to "encourage, arouse these initiatives and offer them political
and technical support." ( CduC 248, p. 9) On these extraordinarily
meager foundations, the Cahiers group would like to construct
"proletarian" culture.
In espousing such a program for culture, the Cahiers group ignores what
is for Marxists a material fact: that the working class, even in the most
developed Western "democracies," has been deliberately deprived of
education and the leisure to create, and that only the socialist revolution
can ultimately release that creativity. As part of a revolutionary
program, Marxists call for the defense and preservation of oppressed
national cultures and decry the victimization by capitalism of
revolutionary artists. But these cultures and artists do not constitute a
political arm of the revolutionary party, nor are they seen as the
exclusive constituent elements of an evolving proletarian culture. It was
clear to Lenin after the October Revolution that the ersatz "workers'
culture," first elaborated by the iconoclast Proletkult, sprang from the
utopian idealism of enthusiastic intellectuals and that it had no material
basis in reality. In his "On Proletarian Culture," Lenin defends the
Marxist view of cultural history and describes the function of culture
under the dictatorship of the proletariat:
"Marxism has won its historic significance as the ideology of
the proletariat because, far from rejecting the most valuable
achievements of the bourgeois epoch, it has, on the contrary,
assimilated and refashioned everything of value in the more
than two thousand years of the development of human
thought and culture. Only further work on this basis and in
this direction, inspired by the practical experience of the
proletarian dictatorship as the final stage in the struggle
against every form of exploitation, can b recognized as the
development of a genuine proletarian culture." f23I
Lenin's conception of the democratization of culture was not that
culture should be brought to the level of ignorance imposed on the
masses by the ruling class, but that the masses should be given access,
through a revolutionary program of education, to the heritage of the
past and to the Marxist assessment of human history. Such is the
material basis that Marx saw for the evolution of a new culture.
The political history of Cahiers du cinema sheds light on the problems
facing contemporary Marxist criticism. It reveals the major distortions
of the Marxist approach to culture — formalism and Socialist Realism —
which characterize much critical theory being written today. As
Marxists, we must reject the attempts on the part of contemporary
critics to recast formalism in "political" molds. Such attempts are
political charlatanism and have little to do with a Marxist attitude
toward culture. We must also reject Socialist Realism with its distorted
conception of the relations between art and politics and its insistence on
the subservience of art to the dictates of a party. In their work,
revolutionary artists, under decadent capitalism, reflect the insoluble
contradictions of class society and give expression to the need to liberate
intellectual creation from capitalist servitude. However, Marxists do not
hold that artists and critics are charged with intervening in the class
struggle in a programmatic way. Intervention in the working class with
a political program is, as Lenin insisted, properly the task of a
disciplined revolutionary party.
It is significant that Cahiers du cinema in the most recent period is in
silent retreat from the consequences of a full-blown Socialist Realist
program. In historical terms, this "new" period corresponds to a lull in
working class militancy and is widely echoed in the French intellectual
"left" milieu. There is an apparent de-escalation of "ideological" struggle
and a new emphasis placed on other methodologies, most notably
psychoanalysis. The Cahiers retreat from its hardline position is
characterized by the relative absence of cultural activism, a new turn
toward formal analysis (much of which is only obscurely political), and a
perceptible softening of its crude class-determinist perspective on
culture. This new vacillation is a clear, if unacknowledged, admission
that Socialist Realism is a dead end, both intellectually and politically.
The lesson to be drawn from the political history of Cahiers du cinema
is that the entire body of current "Marxist" theory must be reexamined
in the light of the original Marxist texts and the experience of the early
Soviet state. Only on this basis can Marxist criticism contribute to a
materialist understanding of culture.
Notes
n For a perspective on these polemics, see: "Du bon usage de la valeur
d'echange (Les Cahiers du cinema et le Marxisme Leninisme)," editors,
Cinethique #6, January-February 1970. Marcelin Pleynet, "Le point
aveugle," Cinethique #6. Jean-Patrick Lebel, "Cinema et Ideologic I," La
Nouvelle Critique #34, April 1970. Michel Ciment and Louis Seguin,
"Sur une petite bataille d'Othon," Positif #122, December 1970.
2^ The political evolution of Cahiers du cinema has been a process, and
these dates are of course approximate. However, the two political
periods, as I will indicate, are clearly marked off by major political
statements by the Cahiers group and constitute abrupt shifts in the
orientation of the journal's work.
3. Translations appear in Screen, 12:1 and 12:2, Summer and Fall 1971.
For documentation on the Chinese Communist Party's participation
in the formulation of the Popular Front, see: Seventh Congress of the
Communist International: Abridged Stenographic Report of the
Proceedings. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1939.
5* Cf. Lenin, Materialism and Empiriocriticism, 1908.
A Camilla Gray, The Russian Experiment in Art. New York: Harry N.
Abrams, Inc., 1970, p. 219.
%. Marx and Engels, Selected Works, volume 2. Moscow: Progress
Publishers, 1969, p. 170.
£L Political opportunism characterized by the limitation of revolutionary
activity to simple trade-unionism.
<L Camilla Gray, p. 245.
10. For an excellent account of Lenin's interventions in cultural matters,
see: Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Commissariat of Enlightenment.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970.
11. Translation in Screen, 12:1, p. 35.
12. Camilla Gray, p. 245.
13. Mao Tse-Tung, Mao Tse-tung on Literature and Art. Peking:
Foreign Language Press, 1967.
14. For an account of the events, see bourgeois scholar Merle Goldman's
Literary Dissent in Communist China. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1967, pp. 18-50.
15. Marx and Engels, Selected Works, volume 3, p. 502.
16. From Marx's Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy. Lee
Baxandall and Stefan Morawski, eds., Marx and Engels on Literature
and Art. St. Louis/Milwaukee: Telos Press, 1973, p. 134.
17 . Baxandall and Morawski, p. 115.
18. Vyacheslav Polonsky, "Lenin's Views of Art and Culture," in Max
Eastman, Artists in Uniform. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc.,
1972, pp. 217-252.
iq. Lenin, Collected Works, volume 10. Moscow: Progress Publishers,
1966, p. 47.
20. Sheila Fitzpatrick, p. 134.
21. See bourgeois historian David Caute's Communism and the French
Intellectual, 1914-1960. New York: The MacMillan Company, 1964.
22. The crucial questions to be answered are the following: Where does
workers' power in fact lie? Where do communists choose to intervene,
particularly in a period of crisis of leadership? Revolutionaries do not
shun foyers and cineclubs, but foyers and cineclubs do not constitute
one of the three fronts of class struggle, as Engels defined them.
23. Lenin, Collected Works, volume 31, pp. 316-317.
To top Current issue Archived essays Jump Cut home
JUMP CUT
A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY MEDIA
Critical dialogue:
No tundra theory, please
by Bill Nichols
from Jump Cut, no. 17, April 1978, p. 36
copyright Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, 1978, 2005
JUMP CUT NO. 16 has arrived up here in Canada at last. It's a very
impressive issue. The Special Section on gay films marks an important
step forward for political film criticism and hopefully will become a
regular aspect of JUMP CUT's ongoing work.
There's just one little problem. Not with the Special Section. With one of
the "Theory" articles, namely William Van Wert's analysis of Robin
Wood's criticism . There's a wee tinge of the urban provincial or the
Yankee chauvinist peeping through what is an otherwise reasonable
spelling out of Wood's conservative aesthetic. It seems to be directed at
Canada.
Canadian film criticism needs no defense, especially in an issue which
openly acknowledges that it is alive and well (pp. 2,13, 39), which
counts Canadian critics among its contributors. And yet, Van Wert
believes Wood's troubles stem, in part, from being out in the tundra too
long: "one wonders uneasily if the quote has anything to do with Wood's
going off to Canada for three years" (p. 34). Why "one"/Van Wert
wonders — about Wood's reference to Yeats and the apocalypse in
relation to a Canadian "exile — is as difficult to fathom as Wood's
original reference, if not more so.
Van Wert goes on, describing Wood's attacks on modernists (Godard) by
recourse to the past (George Eliot). Once again he wonders,
"I really didn't understand where he was coming from (apart
from three years in Canada listening to Schubert's
'Wintereise' for breakfast, while cooking, while gardening)."
Something of an "out-of-it-up-north" complex seems to be developing
here. It leads Van Wert to take another stab at a tundra-theory of
conservative criticism. Like Ian Cameron and Andrew Sarris, Van Wert's
Robin Wood would not take kindly to Screen's dominance of British film
criticism. Unlike Cameron and Sarris, though, Wood at least has an
excuse:
"It's as if, like Rip Van Winkle, Wood emerged from three years in
Canada to find that he'd become an anachronism."
"One wonders" how Martin Walsh remained so vital and political a critic
despite five years in Canada, given Van Wert's strange proclivity toward
geographic determinism. Not all of us are so fortunate as Van Wert to
live smack up against the heartbeat of theoretical/political criticism in
Philadelphia, but not all of us have turned completely into reactionary
pods either. Perhaps when Van Wert finishes his child's checkup, he can
pop up to Canada and bestow his diagnostic skills upon the rest of the
Canadian film community. I for one would eagerly welcome such a visit:
I've recently begun to develop an interest in Schubert's "Wintereise,"
though I still prefer Eric Clapton while gardening.
We apologize to our Canadian readers for an obvious lapse in vigilance.
— The Editors
To top Current issue Archived essays Jump Cut home
JUMP CUT
A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY MEDIA
Critical dialogue
Twelve frames per second
by Chuck Kleinhans
from Jump Cut, no. 17, April 1978, p. 36
copyright Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, 1978, 2005
William Guvnn's article on Cahiers du cinema in this issue (pp 32-35)
provides an important argument in the on-going analysis and evaluation
of the last ten years of French film criticism. In the past decade French
critics and filmmakers have done more — quantitatively and
qualitatively — to debate and develop Marxist film theory and practice
than any group has done since the Soviet 20s. We in the English
speaking world have much to learn from this ferment: from the mistakes
and from the positive achievements. Guynn's article raises the major
and key questions: what were (and are) the politics of the Cahiers
critics, and were those good politics?
I believe Guynn only tells half the story. His conclusions are severely
compromised by a reductionist and simplistic approach. Therefore I
want to present some points as comment and corrective, at the same
time hoping others will join in an ongoing discussion of recent French
criticism and filmmaking and the political issues involved.
CAHIERS' INFLUENCE.
Guynn claims Cahiers has been followed with considerable awe in the
U.S. This isn't true. The general attitude of U.S. film scholars and critics
has been to regret Cahiers' left turn. Mention of post'68 Cahiers by
Sarris, for example, is always coupled with a hearty sneer. The same
attitude from a left position characterizes Cineaste's treatment of
Cahiers. In fact, the basic attitude among U.S. left critics has been to
ignore, or dismiss without extensive examination, the work of Cahiers,
Cinethique, etc.
A distinct minority of U.S. left film people have followed Cahiers closely,
and then they've usually been critical. Furthermore, that part of Cahiers
which has been translated and discussed in England and North America
has tended to be early-phase material ("Cinema/ Ideology/ Criticism,"
and the YOUNG MR. LINCOLN analysis especially). The articles of the
more militant and more Maoist Cahiers period, dominated by direct
political argument, are never discussed by those critics who have been
most forceful in promoting recent French film thought — especially the
group around Screen. (Due to CP influence on Screen ?) When Cahiers
and Cinethique became more overtly Marxist-Leninist, Anglo-North
American followers by and large shifted their attention to the "non¬
political" (i.e., formalist) work of Commnunications (Barthes, Metz,
Bellour, etc.), Qa, etc. In fact very little is known or discussed of the
most clearly Marxist French work of the past decade.
SOCIALIST REALISM AND MAO.
Guynn substitutes prejudice for fact in discussing Mao's position on art
and issues of Socialist Realism. I invite readers to read Mao's writings
on art and culture for themselves before accepting Guynn's
interpretation. As for Socialist Realism, attacking it has become a
banality of current left cultural thought. Can anyone be found to defend
it anymore, save perhaps China's "unrepentant capitalist readers," the
Gang of Four? Yet, while no one will defend the doctrine, neither will
anyone equally dismiss its finest U.S. film product, SALT OF THE
EARTH (see article in JC 10/11). l would suggest that to balance
Guynn's views readers look at Stefan Morawski's discussion of Socialist
Realism (chapter 7) in his Inquiries into the Fundamentals of
Aesthetics.
REDUCTIONISM.
Guynn's statement, that Cahiers never has "been able to resolve
definitively its contradictions," reveals the underlying weakness of his
analysis throughout the article. As Guynn should know, contradictions
cannot be "resolved definitively" in any political project because new
conditions create new contradictions. Since he proceeds without an
adequate understanding of dialectics, Guynn sees no problem with his
reductionist exercise. Thus he makes a handful of articles in Cahiers
stand for a decade's output. Historical development and change is
obliterated in a model of two homogenous stages: first PCF, then
Maoist. However any adequate understanding of Cahiers (even by
bourgeois standards of analysis) would have to deal with the
complicated relation of Cahiers to the left positions advocated by Positif
Cinethique, La Nouvelle Critique, and Tel Quel, just to mention the most
obvious publications. Guynn has nothing to say about the influence of
Althusser's politics, Lacan's psychoanalysis, Metz's semiology, or
Brecht's aesthetics, yet every issue of Cahiers in the period shows these
theories' impact on the magazine, usually overtly. Somehow Guynn
discusses Cahiers without ever really discussing its film criticism
specifically — a rather revealing gap. As a result, Guynn's article comes
close to being a conspiracy theory. We need a much better basis on
which to construct a political critique of Cahiers.
THE "AUTONOMY" OF ART.
Guynn's presentation of Lenin's views and the Bolshevik '20s is highly
selective at best, and distinctly misleading for the most part. Because
every socialist state, past and future, takes over an economy organized
for the benefit of a few rather than the masses of people, it must face a
period of scarcity while organizing production for socialism. The arts are
no exception. The revolutionary party, through the state, has to set
priorities in the arts. During the Russian Civil War an acute paper
shortage restricted all publishing, for example, so hard decisions had to
be made about who and what got published. Lenin himself intervened in
such matters, criticizing Lunacharsky for printing 5,000 copies of a
Mayakovsky poem (Letter of May 6,1921). I think any unprejudiced
reading of Lenin (see his On Literature and Art, Moscow: Progress,
1970) shows that Lenin was at least of two minds about party control of
art — sometimes favoring it, sometimes not.
Certainly, throughout his career, Lenin thought Marxists had something
to offer artists. Guynn apparently does not share this view, for he
ridicules Cahiers' attempt to develop their cultural politics. Yet U.S.
cultural workers face a problem similar to Cahiers' situation. There is no
revolutionary left party with both a politics correct enough to rally a
significant portion of the existing left and deep roots in the working
class. What then should radical culture workers do? Cahiers' solutions,
such as its "relay runners," were awkward, perhaps silly, certainly naive,
but they were genuine attempts to deal with a real situation. In sharp
contrast, Guynn can only ridicule the very effort to do anything. That's
political purism taken to the point of despair.
Although I have many differences with Guynn's version of things, I think
he asks the essential questions: What are the politics of Cahiers, and are
those good politics? These questions are studiously evaded by most of
those who profess the importance of recent French film thought and
filmmaking. Such avoidance is even practiced by the Cahiers crowd. In a
recent interview, Serge Daney, staff member since 1964 and current co¬
editor-in-chief, carefully sidesteps political discussion of the past decade
("Les Cahiers du Cinema, 1968-1977: interview with Serge Daney," The
Thousand Eyes, no. 2,1977,18-31). Daney's evasion must be challenged:
What have been and are Cahiers' politics? Are those good politics? The
questions won't go away.
Finally, even asking those questions, and answering them, is
insufficient. The creation of a Marxist film theory and film practice
adequate to the political and social realities of our time remains a task
before us. However awkwardly, Cahiers contributed to that job, and
deserves our critical attention.
To top Current issue Archived essays Jump Cut home
JUMP CUT
A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY MEDIA
Report on a conference not attended
The scapel beneath the suture
by B. Ruby Rich, Chuck Kleinhans,
and Julia Lesage
from Jump Cut, no. 17, April 1978, pp. 37-38
copyright Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, 1975, 2005
There is an old story about the medical profession — that being
someone's "colleague" means not telling when you find their scalpel
inside your ailing patient. We refuse to be colleagues. There is a scalpel
beneath this suture. We have seen it.
This past winter the normally sleepy world of academic film studies
witnessed a considerable brouhaha surrounding a conference organized
for 20th Century Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, by
British theorist Stephen Heath. Acting out of political conviction and a
strong sense of self-respect, a number of people, including some JUMP
CUT staff members, joined in a protest of the conference's elitism and
sexism. This criticism reflects a growing sentiment against the "business
as usual" and "boy's club" atmosphere of cinema studies.
In a previous JUMP CUT report ("The Signifier that Failed to Make
Milwaukee Famous," JC 10/11), Chuck Kleinhans criticized an earlier
UW-M film conference. Since this year's conference leader, Stephen
Heath, was aware of radical and liberal skepticism about Milwaukee
events in the past, in spring 1977 he announced that the February 1978
meeting would be different: Six to eight months in advance, an overview
position paper outlining the central topic ("The Cinematic Apparatus:
Technology as Historical and Ideological Form") and a detailed
bibliography of pertinent readings would be sent out, allowing people to
prepare for the event. This way the conference would provide a learning
situation rather than the usual closed dialogue. Heath added that the
perspective of the conference would be Marxist. Further information,
however, never came — nor the promised papers. Finally, in mid-
October an extensive promotional mailing went out to the U.S. film
studies community announcing the conference, four major speakers
(Heath; French film semiotician Christian Metz; British theorist and
filmmaker Peter Wollen; and Jean-Louis Comolli, filmmaker and
Cahiers du cinema critic), and two major films (RIDDLES OF THE
SPHINX by Laura Mulvey and Wollen, and Comolli's LA CECILIA —
reviewed in JC 2/13). The announcement and a cover letter invited
participation
At this juncture a number of people, including JUMP CUT staff,
criticized the exclusive selection of men as conference all-stars which
overlooked many qualified women. As conference plans became clearer,
the number, variety, and intensity of criticisms increased, focusing
especially on issues of sexism, elitism, the narrowness of the topic, and
the selection process for the 75 participants. As final plans for the
conference were set in mid-December, a number of people came to the
conclusion that their criticisms, given in good faith, had no meaningful
effect, From an initial suspicion that the conference was just poorly
planned and could be corrected, many of us came to the conclusion that
the final form of the meeting was Heath and those working with him to
validate their own special line — Lacanian psychoanalysis — and that
the conference structure would be even more sexist and elitist than the
average academic conference. Consequently, the Chicago JUMP CUT
group, asked to make a presentation, turned down the offer and
circulated a one-page statement criticizing the conference. The following
is a detailed presentation of JUMP CUT's criticisms of the conference.
The extraordinary elitism of the conference appeared most clearly in two
ways: the process of selecting the participants and the form of the
meeting itself. The selection process was overlaid with a peculiar double
message. While the event was to be limited to a select 75, the basis for
choosing participants and papers was never made clear. At the same
time, national publicity for the meeting interested many people in the
conference who were later excluded. The effect of this publicity was to
give widespread notice of exclusion, tantalizing the many to ensure a
very high profile for a select few. Such manipulation serves largely to
inflate the self-importance of the organizers. Even the recent ultra¬
bourgeois, ultra-academic Harvard conference on "Bergman and
Dreams," which also restricted numbers, clearly announced a deadline
date and a first-come, first-serve admissions policy.
Just the opposite with Milwaukee: its flyer carefully stated the
conference would be selective, but it gave no criteria for selection. It
turned out that invitations were issued largely on a personal basis via
long distance phone calls from the conference organizers, triggered by
personal suggestions from their own contacts. The clear assumption of
such an "invitational" procedure is that all intelligent, interested
potential attendees are already known by the organizers, and that
virtually all the important serious work is being done by high profile
white male academics who are friendly to the French psychoanalytic line
of Jacques Lacan.
No women were invited to speak at the conference until criticism of this
policy was made in the most vehement terms by JUMP CUT staffers.
Students could attend only if sponsored by invited faculty and then only
three per select teacher. No preliminary notice was given that
filmmakers and their work would be welcome. And the organizers made
no attempt to contact the broad range of experimental filmmakers
whose films might have a direct bearing on the conference topic.
Instead, Heath went so far as to accept a film that was not even
completed when accepted, apparently on the sole basis that one of the
makers was a close friend. Other details confirm the conclusion that the
true basis for selection came almost exclusively from whom you knew,
not what you knew.
Attempts to work cooperatively with Heath were constantly thwarted by
his intransigence. For example, in July, Northwestern University film
faculty decided to coordinate a graduate seminar with the conference
topic. Preliminary inquiries were made then about the topic, the
bibliography, position paper, and student attendance. Heath evaded
giving any straight answers to repeated inquiries until Saturday,
December 17. At that time Chuck Kleinhans, who was to teach the
seminar, was told that he could only bring three students and that he
must name them by Monday. Kleinhans explained that the NU quarter
had ended, that students had left the campus, that any selection would
have to be made in consultation with other faculty and students, and
that those who had registered for the seminar would not be known until
the first day of class, January 3, at which time names could be provided.
Not good enough, he was told by conference associate director, Teresa
de Lauretis — the conference schedule and participant list had to be
fixed immediately. On Monday, Kleinhans explained again the
impossibility of providing three names and asked that three spaces be
held for NU students, explaining as well JUMP CUT's decision to not
attend the meeting. In reaction to JUMP CUT's withdrawal, the NU
students were excluded from the conference. (Subsequent efforts by NU
faculty to negotiate a solution were met with the Bureaucratic Shuffle —
the students concerned were put on a "waiting list" and never admitted).
At this point the conference organizers must have realized that they
would finally be held accountable for their irresponsible planning and
elitist organization, for they attempted to obscure the fundamental
nature of the event with several cosmetic adjustments. Last minute
invitations were made to leftists and women — some of whom had never
even applied to attend. The preliminary program that was sent out in
January gave the superficial appearance of female participation but in
reality almost all the key spots were held by men. Nevertheless, many
saw through these fancy maneuvers. Charles F. Altman, associate
professor of French at Iowa decided not to attend, noting that those
excluded feel — and have every right to feel — that they have been dealt
with insensitively and undemocratically. Indeed they have every reason
to think — and here lies the conference's constitutive paradox — that
they have been treated according to an autocratic lecturing/listening
mode by the very group supposedly supporting a democratic
participation-oriented ethos. How can equality of status be maintained
in a conference which pays a limited number of foreign lecturers to
attend, while exacting from all others, including local lecturers, a stiff
registration fee? How can the gesture of exclusion, as practiced by the
organizers of this year's conference, avoid establishing a class system
within the academic film establishment? In short, the techniques for
organizing, publicizing, and delimiting the conference undermine the
very goals which the organizers had originally announced.
The high-handed mode of selection was reinforced by the very form of
the conference. A set of interlocking factors exhibited a deep elitism.
While the meeting was supposed to discuss very complex theory in a
high-level way, the organizers left the topic deliberately vague so that
people had to read between the lines to figure out what the conference
was about. Clearly it was not about technology — the announced title.
That topic cloaked the considerably more controversial one of
contemporary French psychoanalytic criticism. Because of this
vagueness many potential contributors — particularly ones who might
challenge the Lacanian orthodoxy — did not try to participate, ensuring
that the inner circle would dominate the event. While initially it seemed
that poor organization was the main reason the promised position paper
and bibliography were not sent out in advance, in retrospect it appears
that this material would have revealed the organizers' bias and provided
the opportunity for others to refute it — something they clearly did not
want. The promise that guest speakers would send out their papers in
advance was not kept, while the bibliography was meager and very late
(after attendance was closed). Thus people who could have made good
contributions had no opportunity to prepare thought-out positions.
The conference was clearly set up not only to validate its "heavies" but
also to actively discourage other points of view. Clearly, to have 75
people in one room listen for the first time to a prepared paper on high
level theory and then to debate it without adequate study does not
promote learning or the genuine exchange of ideas. Without papers in
advance and small group discussion — at least as a supplement
(suggestions JUMP CUT repeatedly made before withdrawing) — the
situation encourages extreme aggressivity rather than deliberate and
considered thought. The Milwaukee conference was designed to validate
Lacanian psychoanalysis. Its net result was to reinforce the status quo of
the big shots, to footnote their established positions, to expand the
discipleship of True Believers, and to block any opposition,
contradiction, or even innocently divergent opinions. According to post¬
conference reports, the very form of the meeting substituted for
"dialogue" the choice of patting each other on the back or slapping each
other across the face. Only 20 people talked at the event with any
regularity or frequency. Clearly the event could have been staged for
those 20 — or it could have been opened to 500 to listen to those 20.
The absence of women from the promulgated list of major speakers
doubtless served as warning to many women who might have gone.
Repeated criticisms of this by JUMP CUT staffers and others had little
effect on the organizers. (Heath even took pride in telling Kleinhans that
he, Heath, was "above tokenism" and saw no problem at all with an all¬
male program.) When it became clear that JUMP CUT was going to
blow the whistle on these antics, a fast back-peddling took place. Some
women were invited to the conference who had expressed no previous
interest; a flurry of phone calls inserted females into the program; and
although papers submitted by women were rejected, a few women were
given tertiary positions in the patriarchal order. Professor T. Kaori
Kitao, chairperson of the Art Department at Swarthmore, recognized
what was happening and withdrew from the conference, explaining in a
letter to JUMP CUT:
"In the end I decided to withdraw; it is patent that the
position of moderator is a subservient one. I could not
envision it in any other way than secretarial, gratuitous, and
humiliating. It is rather likely that the moderator will only
introduce the speakers, receive questions from the floor, and
summarize the arguments; but he/she will have little
opportunity to comment, analyze, and retort. And it does
indeed seem women have been typecast to this position at
this conference."
Thus, despite the presence of individual women, there was an absence of
strong feminist politics at the conference itself. Structure and pre¬
selection inhibited any collective female action to counteract the
patriarchal order. The conference repeated the mechanisms of academic
paternalism described by Adrienne Rich in her essay "Conditions for
Work: The Common World of Women" (Heresies 3):
"Many women have known the figure of the male 'mentor'
who guides and protects his female student or colleague,
tenderly opening doors for her into the common world of
men. He seems willing to share his power, to conspire with
her in stealing what Celia Gilbert names ... 'the sacred fire' of
work. Yet what can he really bestow but the illusion of power,
a power stolen, in any case, from the mass of women, over
centuries, by men? He can teach her to name her experience
that may allow her to live, work, perhaps succeed in the
common world of men. But he has no key to the powers she
might share with other women."
The conference organizers know very well that the strongest and most
consistent challenge to Lacanian psychoanalysis has come from
American radical feminists (see, for example, Julia Lesage's critique of
Screen's psychoanalytic sexism, "The Human Subject — You, He, or Me?
or The Case of the Missing Penis," JC 4; "Reply," by Heath, Colin
McCabe, and Ben Brewster, JC 9; and Kleinhans, "A Ventriloquist
Psychoanalysis," JC 9). To preserve the sanctity of their hidden agenda,
the conference organizers maneuvered to ensure that a strong united
feminist voice could not be heard, just as they did not include the
promised Marxist perspective. This is not so surprising, for feminism
and Marxism are antithetical to elitism.
One of the most bankrupt aspects of the conference, and one that serves
to explain why some of the aforementioned antics took place, was that
before the mid-October publicity ever went out calling for participation,
the proceedings were substantially decided in advance so that they could
be published in book form. The institutional, monetary reason for this
kind of decision reveals a bond which grows ever tighter between the
liberal arts and the state in the USA. In this century, the sciences such as
physics and biology have funded much of their programs from grants,
but only recently have liberal arts conferences also brought in big bucks
to the university. Now both the National Endowment for the Humanities
and the National Endowment for the Arts have sections in their funding
apparatus specifically for conferences. University administrators,
especially hard-pressed liberal arts deans, want the large "overhead"
that is tacked on to any grant proposal to accrue to their institution. The
NEA and the NEH demand that all proposals demonstrate their "spin¬
off' value — i.e., a major contribution must be made to an academic,
artistic, or scientific field. And in the true spirit of social science
empiricism, that contribution has to be demonstrated tangibly by means
of post-conference attitude surveys, published articles, or, even better, a
book. Over the last two years, papers from previous Milwaukee
conferences have been published in periodicals.
For the director of the program, Michel Benamou, the fact of a book,
irrespective of its worth, will offer more tangible proof to the deans and
the National Endowment bureaucrats that these conferences indeed
provide "substantial contributions to the field." The book, then, by its
very existence, can become the basis upon which the program can
demand further funding for future events. Heath worked out the major
direction of the conference and the book over the summer with
Professor David Bordwell of the Wisconsin-Madison campus. Thus the
October call for participation was essentially phony. Legitimate
submitted papers were rejected by this secret structure. The final shape
of the volume will be dominated by the four "name" speakers and the U.
of Wisconsin coterie. The real "product" of the conference is not a high
level exchange of ideas but a prearranged film book. A new "authority"
will now be encased in a book, which will, in turn, be held up for
validation of future positions. This parody of scholarly inquiry affirms
that the entire conference — from conception to final publication of the
"proceedings" was unnecessary. Such is the end result of a conference
that could not be honest about its intentions.
Because the conference as it shaped up was even worse than the average
academic meeting in terms of elitism and sexism, JUMP CUT withdrew
from participation. We had spent several months of trying to change
things through constructive criticism, assuming that the errors resulted
from ignorance or neglect rather than design. "Working from within"
just didn't work. Our initial criticisms were met with resistance, then
with cosmetic changes, but the basic structure remained the same. Our
initial action had some minor effect, and our withdrawal brought about
further last minute changes. Although women were hurriedly added, the
issue is clear for feminists. Because of feminist agitation, women are
being offered a place in the patriarchy but only on the patriarchy's own
terms — assimilation by invitation — and always, always, one at a time
— the personal phone call certifying one's exceptionality, a touch of the
scepter bestowing a little phallic power withheld from others of one's
kind. The conference was so clearly compromised that editorial board
members of JUMP CUT saw participation as collusion. Such conferences
depend in some part on a token diversity. In this case a few radicals and
feminists for local color validate the conference as "open" and
"pluralistic."
Certainly there are situations when working from within can be an
important tactic. But when the presumed audience for such an action is
so thoroughly pre-packaged, and the agenda is so limited, only
nonparticipation marks a sufficiently forceful and non-cooptable action.
JUMP CUT's non-participation does not mean that we are 'anti-theory"
or "anti-psychoanalysis." Anyone who reads JUMP CUT can see its
commitment to developing theory and its willingness to present and
discuss psychoanalytic work (we were, after ail, the first English
language publication to run a detailed report on Metz's work on
psychoanalysis and film — John Finn, "Metz's New Directions" JC 6).
But we refuse to get on the Lacanian bandwagon, to follow the latest fad,
and to surrender basic political questions to enter the inner sanctum of
psychoanalytic formalism without asking some fundamental questions.
What basis is there for combining psychoanalysis and Marxism? Why is
Lacan preferable to other revisionists of Freud? How can one account
for and deal with the sexist basis of Freud's work? of Lacan's? What of
the clear homophobia in the theory and practice of psychoanalysis?
What is science, and in what way is psychoanalysis scientific? How do
people change, especially in a deliberate way? We think these are open
questions, and we welcome discussion and debate of them — from all
sides — in the pages of JUMP CUT.
In contrast, the Milwaukee conference attempted to establish a
hegemony for psychoanalysis in film theory without asking basic
questions. In the closing session, doubts were expressed about Heath's
hidden agenda. For most participants the conference's net result seemed
to be a flight from politics because the discussion tried to go on outside
of history, outside of society, outside of politics, outside of discussing the
politics of the conference itself. But conferences end, and history and
politics go on. The questions remain: What are the class politics and
feminist politics of those people promoting French psychoanalysis?
What kind of conferences do they run? Who is invited and who is
excluded? Who does the talking and who doesn't? What is being said,
and what is being hidden? Let Heath and the others come forward and
explain their politics — if it wouldn't be too embarrassing for them. Our
pages are open, even if their conferences are closed.
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JUMP CUT
A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY MEDIA
The last word
The politics of editing, part 2
by the editors
from Jump Cut, no. 17, April 1978, p. 39
copyright Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, 1978, 2005
In the first editorial in this series, in JUMP CUT 15, we discussed the
material conditions — our financial and human resources — which
shape JUMP CUT. The internal organization and functioning of the staff
exercises another major influence on our finished product, the JUMP
CUT you hold in your hands. The way in which any group organizes
itself and functions has a genuine political dimension, whether it is
consciously worked out or not. Here we want to describe our internal
organization in its basic form. In future editorials we will elaborate these
concerns in terms of our process of internal education and criticism and
our relations with writers and readers.
There are any number of ways of running a film magazine. A publication
can be structured around the idea of accepting the conventional best of
its declared range of interest. The editor, in this case, simply acts as a
judge who passes on the quality of whatever comes in. In a very different
vein, one individual may run the publication on the basis on his/her
personal vision. Such a model has the flaws and virtues of its leader. The
result can be daring, bizarre, original, offbeat, or just plain awful.
Further, a more or less unified group of people with a specific program
can run the publication together. This model tends to represent the
opinions of a closely associated core group with outsiders contributing if
they fit in with what is going on. Such a model for internal organization
can develop considerable depth and a general "line," but it also relies on
people being geographically concentrated.
JUMP CUT has a different kind of organization, based on both political
considerations and on the material conditions we discussed in issue 15.
The primary political consideration shaping JUMP CUT's staff
organization can be expressed in terms of our political unity: Our first
basis of agreement is to put out a magazine basically like JUMP CUT —
one that defines itself as nonsectarian left, anti-racist, anti-imperialist,
anti-captalist, and anti-sexist. To some that might sound forbidding, to
others it might sound vague. We've been called both utopian and
arrogant for proclaiming these politics openly in a film magazine. But
these politics have genuine implications for the actual practice of JUMP
CUT and reflect a deeper political analysis, much of which has been
described in previous editorials.
We believe that given the present state of the U.S left, it is important for
cultural work to proceed on the basis of uniting as many people as
possible, allowing political differences to emerge and to be actively
debated so as to educate all the participants as well as our readers. Thus
we are open to people of various tendencies on the left and reach out to
people who share our critique of capitalism, especially women, lesbians
and gays, blocks and other third world people, who most sharply feel
their special oppression. Others of our readers may be sympathetic to a
left critique of capitalism but might not have yet developed a political
analysis of that oppression and the social formation that causes and uses
it. In this context, we think it is very important to present a clear left
alternative for people to confront, debate, and decide about.
Although a collective structure would best fit our political philosophy
and needs, we are not a collective — for several reasons. First, in simply
pragmatic terms, we cannot operate as a collective because we can't and
don't all meet together regularly due to geographic dispersion. In fact,
the whole editorial board (the associate editors and the two co-editors)
have never met, and that seems even less likely as the board continues to
grow. Most editors don't know half of the other editors. Even if we could
afford the job-time loss, it would cost a great deal of money simply to fly
everyone to one place for a meeting (a major problem of organizing a
nationally based, left project). Although we lose a lot of mutual support,
reinforcement, stimulation, political dialogue, and friendship from this
dispersion, we gain a tremendous breadth and variety, which prevents
provincialism and inbreeding.
Another reason we are not a collective is that we were not initially
formed as one. The two co-editors, John Hess and Chuck Kleinhans, had
the most time to put in initially, and the three initial associate editors
(Judy Hess, Julia Lesage, and Bill Van Wert) wanted only an advisory
role. Since then we have added other members and grown. Some people
have joined by direct appointment to the editorial board after working
closely with JUMP CUT, but more often people have worked on JUMP
CUT by getting involved with one of the local groups (in the Bay Area,
Chicago, and now New York City). In the past 18 months, many new
people have begun working on JUMP CUT, and the structuring of power
and responsibility is gradually changing in response to new conditions
and new ideas. At present the organization of JUMP CUT is in a process
of development, spurred by political discussion. Thus, while we can
describe our organizational structure in spring, 1978, here, we fully
expect that a year from now the pattern will be different, and in spring,
1980, different again. This change is not haphazard, but it is not
predictable. The outcome depends on political principles, such as trying
to achieve group democracy, and at the same time on our dealing with
practical limits such as geographic dispersion, different skills, and
different amounts of time and commitment, while trying to keep the
day-to-day operation going. In short, we learn, we grow, we change.
JUMP CUT presently has two co-editors who mutually make policy and
final editorial decisions and do much of the on-going work of putting out
JUMP CUT. The magazine does not pay for itself, and the co-editors
contribute most of the subsidy. Because of the time that the co-editors
(John Hess and Chuck Kleinhans) put into JUMP CUT and the
commitment they have to it, they are the most significant powers in
shaping it. Each can veto a decision of the other (though in practice this
has never happened; differences have been worked out in discussion).
Living in separate places, they communicate by letter, tape recordings,
telephone, and visits to each other about twice a year. The actual
workload shifts from time to time onto one or the other editor,
depending on the exigencies of earning a living.
Three JUMP CUT work groups exist. The first was formed in Chicago,
where all layout and distribution was originally done. The second, in
Berkeley, now has taken over much of the material process of layout and
all of the distribution and business work. In the fall of 1977, a third
group began meeting in New York. Each group reads and comments on
manuscripts, handles bookstore distribution in their area, and has taken
on as a task the handling of one or more special sections.
John and Chuck bring all significant policy decisions to the three work
groups and the editorial board members (some of whom live in other
places). While only advisory, the board actually exercises great influence
in raising issues and deciding on policy changes, and most importantly
in evaluating manuscripts. Every incoming manuscript is read by several
members of the editorial board. Who reads what depends on areas of
interest and specialization, time available, and so forth. Evaluations,
comments, and suggested revisions are collected. In cases of clear
differences on the board in evaluating an article, other board members
read the manuscript in order to help make the final decision. Once these
evaluations are gathered in Chicago or Berkeley, an editor responds to
the writer.
We circulate articles and reviews written by anyone working on JUMP
CUT to as many staff members as possible for input and decision¬
making. Because what editors write for the magazine has the effect of
giving direction, setting policy, supplying leadership to readers and
possible contributors, it is important to involve everyone on the board in
the process. This policy has additional importance as a way of holding
the co-editors accountable for what they write for JUMP CUT. We find
that writing for publication functions as a learning process. Discussion
of each other's work contributes to the political and intellectual growth
of all of us.
Since becoming JUMP CUT's book review editor, Jerry Peary has
occupied a special position with regard to that area, since he keeps track
of new books, contacts writers, does the initial editing, and corresponds
with writers. Similarly, Ernie Larsen has just taken on responsibility for
getting reviews of current commercial films. Both are part of the new
New York group. In addition, different editors are coordinating
upcoming special sections. Julianne Burton is working on one on Cuban
cinema, and the women on the editorial board are working on a special
section on lesbians and film. Bob Stam is coordinating a section on
Brazilian film. Other sections are planned on video and broadcast TV.
The people listed as assistant editors occupy a kind of "trial" position,
having worked on JUMP CUT for three months. After another four
months and the recommendation of a co-editor, they will also become
associate editors. We also have some people listed as helpers on each
issue. Some regularly participate in the Berkeley, Chicago, or New York
group and are becoming assistant editors. Other folks occasionally help
out with various tasks, but don't participate in decision-making. The
only people who receive money for their labor are our typists, who
prepare articles for printing, and our printers.
JUMP CUT defines itself as a political project and all the people working
on it see this work as political activity. The primary reward we get for
this work is the satisfaction of participating in political struggle in an
area — culture — that is important to us. By being involved in such a
project, we learn skills, grow intellectually and politically, and gain
confidence in ourselves. People learn how to do layout, edit copy,
discuss manuscripts politically, write to contributors, operate a
magazine like JUMP CUT, and, perhaps most important, how to work
politically with each other.
Because of the editors' dispersion, our various levels of political
experience, our different political positions, anything approaching a
JUMP CUT "line" is impossible. We balance uncomfortably between
wanting the clarity of a unified approach to films (Tanner yes or no,
Hollywood great or horrible, independent films important or not) and
recognizing the pluralism that the nature of our editorial board and the
needs of the times necessitate. We recognize, too, that contradictions are
inevitable in any political structure or activity and that it is best to deal
with them openly rather than try to hide them. Thus tension and
diversity are very much part of JUMP CUT and underlie its creativity,
growth, and variety. As it should be, JUMP CUT is an arena of political
struggle.
Because of the diversity of views, personalities, and work styles, because
geographic dispersion makes close personal ties difficult to establish and
maintain, relations on JUMP CUT are sometimes stormy. In a group
situation (in Berkeley, Chicago, New York) or with the relations between
isolated editors and Chuck and John, political disagreements are dealt
with openly, often with consultation with the other work groups.
However distressing conflict may be personally, we feel that raising and
dealing with contradictions is an essential part of any viable political
project. We have tried to bring some of these debates into the pages of
the magazine. For example, in JUMP CUT 15 we printed two views of
Tanner's JONAH which brought out some distinct political differences
in the staff. Other contrasting articles and reviews, and the ongoing
discussion in Critical Dialogue, demonstrate the kind of diversity we
favor.
JUMP CUT does not, as some people have assumed, present the Marxist
film criticism. In fact, not all the editors are Marxists and many of our
writers are not. We also have to recognize disagreements among
Marxists and other radicals in many areas of culture and politics.
Because we try to deal with differences and diversity in as open and
politically principled a way as possible, JUMP CUT continues to change,
grow, and improve.
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